


The Space Beyond

by pettiot



Series: Dragon Age II Kinkmeme [1]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Consent Issues, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Recovery, past trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:53:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 73,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22508845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: Anders offers his limited capacity for aftercare. Fenris finds a way to provide the same.
Relationships: Anders/Fenris
Series: Dragon Age II Kinkmeme [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1619464
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	The Space Beyond

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for character (and reader, and author) recovery after events of The Wall, a dragon age kinkmeme fill, where lyrium addicted templars take Fenris for milking. The Wall can be found in my archive or at the kinkmeme: https://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/8832.html?thread=33413760#t33413760. Warnings for heavy non-con, horror, degradation. 
> 
> The Space Beyond makes reference to events of The Wall, but it does not have the same focus.

Anders dropped the last copy into the flames, where it smoked obnoxiously.

From behind him came the sound of a footstep grinding closer through years of old dirt. His glance back was reflex. There was only one person who would still bother to look for him here.

'Strange time for cleaning out the old place.' The tone tried to mollify. 'Is that your manifesto feeding the flames?'

'Not any more.'

'I wanted to talk to you.'

'If I'd wanted to talk I would have just come home.'

An empty mansion, no mother, no sister, an alienated brother who rarely visited. A hesitant dwarven servant and a lord of the house losing his diplomacy to the melancholy. Anders kept to his suite, Hawke kept to his, and the great hearth in the common room was rarely lit.

Hawke could have stopped him. Hawke could have stopped them.

They only had each other left, after all. Anders let the anger go, the light dying.

A gentling hand on his shoulder, sympathy a weapon Hawke used too well. 'Anders. I am sorry she died, but I don't hate you for it, whatever you want. Here.'

A letter he was beyond reading. Anders accepted the paper stiffly. Hawke stayed too close by his side, fidgeting with his purse.

'Lifted from Karras' corpse. You know Carver always said Karras was Alrik's second. His Tranquil solution in bold script, so your paranoia was justified, at least. The girl didn't die for nothing. It might help to know the Chantry rejected the proposal.'

Anders did not look away from Hawke's eyes.

Tongue flicking over dry lips, the assurance momentarily faltered. 'Karras also had two of these. I broke the first one, or I never would have guessed what it was--'

Anders accepted the small flask with its milky liquid within, removed the stopper, sniffed and recoiled. Repulsed before the realisation of what exactly it was; smell was close enough to taste, even if it had been years.

'Yes, very funny, Hawke, well done. Especially with the poor girl's blood still in my hair. The perfect time for a practical joke.'

'You know what it is?'

Anders scowled, said mockingly, 'Sex magic. Instead of blood magic. Seminal humours, much less grievous and it keeps the desire demons particularly happy.'

'It's Fenris's.'

'What, like a love letter?'

'On a templar's body? Not like a letter. Just. It's his. Taste it.'

Anders would have welcomed the snap of command, if not for the actuality of compliance. 'Are you serious?'

Hawke raked his fingers over his face. 'Taste it, and please tell me I'm not mad.'

'Go play your jokes on Varric. It's been a while, he must miss them.'

'Wrong orientation, wrong species, wrong specialisation. Only a mage--' The bitter mirth gentled, helplessly, as if something had collapsed inside. 'Or a templar.'

Such conviction, when it had been too long since Hawke had been certain about anything. Anders dipped his smallest finger into the vial and touched it to his tongue, hesitant. 'Well, that was unpleasantly unnecessary--'

Lyrium caught between his tongue tip and the roof of his mouth.

The vial bounced twice before shattering. Anders and Hawke stared at the broken glass, the pitiable contents.

'He never left,' Hawke said. 'I looked for him. Not long enough. Never enough.'

'But Varric never heard a whisper. Or Aveline, for that matter. Fenris was well known, someone would have talked if he was still in the city. Even Tevinter's ugliest talking ass came to the same conclusion we did.'

That had been months ago now, the most uncomfortable meeting in Anders' recent memory even with respect to Hawke's negotiations with the Qunari. Hawke had seen no socially acceptable way out of rejecting the carefully contrived self-invitation into his own home, not when Danarius carried diplomatic immunity and a templar audience. Over dinner the magister was courteous, if laughably ridiculous in his affectations, effete enough they had choked on it afterwards, at the thought of Fenris of all people being in this man's power. Pathetic and horrible, both at once. Stranger still had been the odd Tevinter respect Danarius had shown for the two powerful mages who flaunted it in the Chantry's face, offering praise for their rumoured 'care' and control for Fenris and his fits of temper in Danarius' absence.  
_  
Tell me, which of you developed the fondness for the boy? He's a talented lad, so eager. So invested, which is valuable in a bodyguard. Certain perks made him especially invaluable to me._

The memory mixed unpleasantly with the lyrium spark in Anders' mouth, the lingering male taste. His manifesto, thick enough to choke a fire to smoke, the clinic's smell of old blood and sickness was too much. Anders arched his head back to restrain the nauseous impulse.

'Garrett? Tell me you didn't.'

Hawke was still. 'You're a mage. You like men. Imagine--'

'You used him. The way that sodding magister used him!'

They looked at the broken flask again.

Hawke pushed his hands into his sleeves. 'He came to me willingly, which is more than I can say for that night we met after he led me into a slaver's trap. I swear it, Anders. He came to me, I would never have pushed him. I didn't even think about the lyrium until he was done and I--'

Isabela joked about how rotten the shag must have been, back when she was around. When Fenris was around, too, carefully avoiding Hawke in the aftermath. Anders had let himself be amused imagining just how badly it could have gone.

'I can't believe I still underestimate your capacity for distasteful acts.'

The eyebrows lowered. 'As distasteful as killing girls for calling you the wrong name?'

Anders bridled, caught, said, 'I thought you didn't want to fight about that?'

Hawke glared a moment longer then nodded, turning away. Anders rubbed his aching neck, breath still too fast and shallow, skin clammy. He was in shock, though whether from that shameful spill puddling around broken glass or from the disastrous battle with Karras before, he did not know.

'It couldn't have been a mage that took him, Hawke. Not and kept it quiet this long. Not in this city.'

'Quentin,' Hawke looked startled at his own harshness. 'As an example of a mage who did keep things quiet.'

'Even with Quentin, there were whispers, shouts, in the end. Think about Tarohne, the trail she left even with blood magic behind her. Mages can't move in Kirkwall without someone hearing about it. You took that filth fresh off a templar corpse, I say it was templars.'

'You always say templars.'

'And what do you say? Fenris was your friend. Your lover.'

The bland mask asserted itself over emotion. 'I say it's time to invite my brother to dinner again.'

However Garrett worded the missive to his brother, the reply was back before Anders finished bathing, a frugal acquiescence, excess space stretching between the lines. Meredith was unlikely to ever stop her templar his chance to report back on the status of the apostates in the Hawke household whatever Carver's rostered duties.

In retreat from last night's failures, Anders slunk into the Hanged Man in the interim, indulging in one of his talks with Varric that he had not quite been able to give up despite the bad blood between Hawke and Tethras. Trying to avoid clarifying the issue of the disgusting discovery on Karras' body, Anders found himself divulging everything, then being talked into talking Varric into coming to dinner. An objective viewpoint might be worthwhile, Anders knew.

Follow the lyrium, Varric's objective viewpoint had suggested. Follow the money, because no one had wanted to know about Fenris last time they searched for him.

Carver arrived, wary immediately to discover himself subject of questioning, in his formal armour for some reason. The inn's delivered food cooled on the table as he and his brother glared at each other across the expanse.

'We don't buy lyrium, brother. They give it to us, you can't get more by asking.'

'If you want more and don't want to ask?'

Carver's scowl deepened. 'You want the details, become a templar.'

'A templar secretly a mage.' Varric said. 'Interesting premise. How would that work?'

'It wouldn't,' the Hawke brothers growled; Varric raised his palms, appeasing.

Anders leaned forward. 'Has there been anyone else who seems to be getting more?'

Carver looked at his brother, because Carver did not like looking at Anders at the best of times. The abomination who put his brother at greater risk. The one who had filled his place. Anders toasted the Hawke profiles with his fine glass of wine.

'I wouldn't tell you if I knew.'

'Because nearly all of you are getting more,' Anders suggested.

'I will not compromise--'

'Your own source?'

Carver's deflected glare moved to the tabletop, as much irritation as avoidance. 'Listen, mage. There are other apostates in this city who don't have the benefit of your money, your friends. I will not compromise anyone for the sake of my brother's poorly thought ventures.' His scorn returned to Garrett, 'What do you even need more money for, brother? I never thought you were greedy as well as stupid. And lyrium smuggling is stupid.'

Testament to Hawke's mood that he merely frowned, a shoulder rolling.

Carver soon took his leave, Hawke rose to frustrate his fist on the mantlepiece, Anders ate the remaining stew. Otherwise replete, Varric drummed fingertips on the table in idle thought.

To thwart the potential of fraught silences, Anders said, 'My money's on our boy still shagging that Dalish. You Hawke brothers and your elf fetish.'

Varric winced. 'Uh, Hawke? The templar, Keran. He still owes you a favour. If you need an inside ear in the templars, how about him?'

'Keran runs in the opposite direction when he sees us coming.'

'Literally,' Anders added. 'Maker knows how he talked his way back into the templar fold after our champion of tact here was done.'

'No,' Hawke said. 'This is what we're going to do.'

He took his staff from the rack in the foyer with careless noise, leaving the doors open in his wake.

'That's more the Hawke I remember.'

'Why, Varric. You sound almost wistful.'

An embarrassed shrug. 'No one reads about the self pitying hero. All fantasy and triumph in these trying times. When it's not romance, that is.'

Outside, they did not run. Hawke had caught up to his brother, the cobbles and walls echoing with struggle, which was better, Anders thought, than emptiness and mice.

'--where is he?'

'I keep saying! Who?'

Carver's plate armour limited the usual submission holds, the propensity of fine maroon houserobes to sunder at the slightest force doing little to assist. Anders averted his eyes from the decidedly unFerelden lack of chest hair, Varric failing to shield his amusement with a cough.

'Just like old times?'

'Could we have ever missed it that much.'

'Fenris,' Hawke eventually shouted. 'Fenris, Fenris, Fenris.'

'What?' Carver, incredulous. 'How would I know that? He left Kirkwall months ago!'

Garrett was briefly on top, Carver's wrist twisted between his thighs and his elbow in Carver's vulnerable throat. 'Because of the lyrium, you bloody--'

'I hope I'm intruding.'

Anders and Varric turned.

In working regalia, Aveline crossed her arms, native intolerance warring with resignation. 'Because I do not need an angry shirtless apostate in my streets tonight. Or a wounded templar, be it pride or otherwise.' The stern profile moved from the scene, fixing Anders. 'Take him home before I have to arrest him.'

'You assume I take responsibility for this? As if Hawke would let me have even an inch of his glory.'

Aveline studied him as if looking for the reasoning. But he had never been big on logic.

'Tell me these two had nothing to do with the commotion at the Blooming Rose.'

'What commotion at the Blooming Rose?'

'We were in the estate,' Varric said. 'Just came out for a stroll after supper. A bracing stroll, in their case.'

'Apparently the boiler room exploded. There's screaming prostitutes all over the square.' Aveline indicated the smoke rising thick above the Hightown rooves. A line of guards sprinted through the square at their back, carrying buckets for the Hightown well; Aveline gave one last warning glare at Anders before Aveline joined them. 'End this. And don't start anything else, if you can possibly help it.'

Varric contemplated the rising plume. 'What do you think, Blondie? Screaming prostitutes or brawling brothers? Or do I even have to ask?'

The battle had always been unequal. Anders collected Garrett too easily, frowning at the fingerprint bruises Carver could not help but leave, Hawke brushing away his apologetic touch. His own cheek scratched with three parallel lines, Carver tolerated staunchly the handclasp his brother offered in apology.

'Look, if I hear anything about Fenris, I'll let you know immediately. But I don't see--'

'There's nothing to be heard.' Hawke had practised blankness to the point of insult, sharper than all his sarcasm.

'Big Hawke appreciates the sentiment, little Hawke. That's what he meant to say.'

The lips softened, admitted, 'If I didn't keep my tongue in your mouth, Varric, I surely wouldn't know what to say.'

A matching crooked grin. Carver clapped his brother on the shoulder dangling a tattered sleeve. 'Write me more. A sad state if it always takes a funeral when you're the one with the life of leisure.'

When Carver was out of earshot, Hawke said, 'You're the one who turned your back on it.'

Again the uncomprehending hurt, when Anders could not believe Hawke still did not understand.

Since the Qunari incident, the city guard had trained at preventing conflagration. The smoke plume from the Rose's basement thinned and tapered long before they arrived, bucket after bucket ending even the smouldering, leaving only sodden wood and Madame Lusine bemoaning the saturation of imported silk sheets. They joined the Hightowners gawking with the Rose's staff and patrons scattered amongst them, in various states of undress if not screaming. Aveline's senior staff questioned them in pairs, with some hooded persons flashing brief dialogue at the guards and retreating discreetly. Prominent members of Kirkwall's society, Anders assumed, and felt his lip curl in disdain.

Hawke turned away from the absence of scene first.

'Bored already? I could start another fire if you like.'

'There are more important things on my mind than spectator sport.'

'Oh, yes. Your mind. Meanwhile don't mind me, or my plans for this evening subverted yet again to your cause.'

'What plans.'

Almost a scoff. Very nearly successful. 'Spending my evening brooding productively in a Darktown slum about the murder of an innocent mage girl, of course. Oh, no, mysteriously grotesque vials and equally grotesque synchronicity are much more important than repentant grieving. The least I could do for you is start another conflagration.'

If his mouth quirked, Hawke shook his head, still walking away, staff incongruous across his back with a mostly torn silk shirt beneath. Varric looked at Anders quizzically.

'Mage girl?'

Anders tugged at his earlobe and regretted his more charitable instincts. 'Later?'

They both made haste after their wandering leader.

At the first crossroads, the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps filled the dark street to the right.

Hawke reached for his staff with an almost blind instinct, Anders touching the dagger at his belt. Varric hummed his usual tune, so familiar Anders missed the sound for all the times he had taken it for granted.

'Messere Hawke! Champion, Maker bless. Come quickly, this way!'

It was a lone guard, shield and sword lost somewhere, her helm as well, wearing stark worry with as little comfort as her armour.

'Ambush?' Varric considered.

'Hawke's not exactly paying attention if it is,' Anders called back, already running after Hawke's mad dog sprint, regretting intensely the extra stew. Varric fell in behind, wary enough to guard in case of the worst.

But there was no ambush.

Only bodies, torn apart and still steaming.

'Templars,' Hawke gasped, from a breath-ravaged throat.

Even from this distance Anders knew none were Carver, and was more relieved that he could have suspected. The lone guard leading them immediately joined the others of her patrol standing about the scene, looking stunned. Donnic knelt beside the only unarmoured body, wearing a strange expression. His gaze arrowed across the last distance.

'Anders,' Donnic shouted. 'Here, here, his throat!'

So much blood.

Because the clinic's lantern burned more blood than oil those days, Anders had stopped lighting it, but necessity overruled shame. Healing used to be his instinct. As much instinct as the blind, overwhelming pity for the skeleton in Donnic's hands.

He could have made this right, once upon a time.

Familiar warmth rose to his palms and spread, as if it had not been months since he could last heal.

Anders' brow furrowed, eased. The reasons were unimportant. Only the healing.

The body carried its own memory of the rightness of being, which a mage's healing simply reinstated. Each thread of flesh knew its own health, strove to survive even if the intangible part which was person longed for death. These injuries, extensive though they were, should have been simple.

The metal collar crushed throat, tore flesh, left a fracture in the jaw, a torn cheek and bruising. Blood entered the lungs with each ragged breath. The blow's force had damaged muscle around the neck, pinched nerves between vertebrae. But this was still simple, throat closing, broken jaw sealing, lungs working to expel substance, the pitiful body wracked with raw, wet coughs now the throat was whole enough to contain them.

There were sores. Inflammation and infection married together, and Anders could not separate them to let the flesh remember how to be right. Muscle knotted into such flawed form. Starvation, malnutrition more than lack of substance, for which he could do nothing. Even the mindless muscle around the stomach was damaged, acid scarring the gullet, not held where the body was supposed to hold it. Inflamed liver, inflamed prostate, inflamed--

Anders trembled, mana flowing out of him like water, drunk by a body of crying mouths.

But the body still rejected him. Wanted rest. It was the person who demanded he continue, with hands clawed around his wrists.

_I want to live._

A silent demand, felt in the pulse they momentarily shared, mana pouring through Anders like water.

Hawke's voice was distant, not calling Anders' name.

Abruptly the skeleton bent and cried out. The voice came jagged with remembered damage, but it would soften. That was survival. Anders redoubled his efforts until his periphery went black, seeing only the face. Hawke's hands were big and clumsy over a scalp stuccoed with white stubble and old scars. His rings, the shining clean nails, the light dusting of hair, his leisurely life.

'Fenris,' said Hawke. 'What have they done to you?'

Mindless eyes opened, black devouring the green, rolling back into the skull in escape. Anders stayed in the grip of claws of bone.

I want you to live, Anders thought. 

_Live._

As if the thought had been the only thing keeping person bound to flesh, want echoing in lyrium pulse instead of blood--

Even with the name now spoken, Anders refused recognition. Because this broken thing insisting on life could not be Fenris. Anders did not want to pity Fenris. Kirkwall would revolt before he would pity Fenris even one day spent in templar hands.

'I haven't got any more. I can't erase what happened!'

'It's enough,' Donnic's palms warm and heavy on Anders' shoulders. 'Anders, healer. It's enough. He's breathing, he's not...bleeding, or drowning in it. Maker preserve, I saw. Thought--'

Anders rose, unable to hide that he did so with difficulty. He stumbled, then pressed his hand against stone, borrowing stability. Donnic stood at his other side, ready to catch him if he fell.

'How long have they had him?'

'How long has he been gone,' Anders asked roughly. 'You know better than I. You were his friend.'

Fenris still flinched from Hawke's soothing, ducking his head every time Hawke tried to make him show his face. Across the street, Alrik slumped against the opposite wall as though suddenly weary of his silverite. He lay opened from groin to nose, guts between the slack knees. His tongue lay in two strips all the way along his opened throat, placed with such precision over each lapel of rent plate armour. A tangle of organ dripped between the destroyed jaw.

'It's all right, Fenris. It's me! You're free now, I have you--'

'Get away from him, Hawke.'

Anders hardly recognised his own voice. Hawke looked death at him.

'He never liked being touched. Did you forget?'

And untouched, Fenris sighed a surrender, turning his face to the sky. Calm. Hawke hunched as if struck.

Anders closed his eyes. Opening them, he found Aveline had joined her guards, an incongruous bucket tucked beneath her arm and soot on her cheek, surveying the scene expressionlessly. 'More dead templars. Didn't I tell you not to start anything else?'

She glared at Anders, as if he had killed them all.

'Fenris did this,' Donnic said. 'He must have. Look at his hands. Those templars.'

Anders looked at his own hands instead, blood flaking from palms and wrists. Templar blood, from Fenris' grip. Some animal part roared with approval.

'Someone will have to answer for this,' Aveline said. She must have been shocked. Her voice was all rage.

Hawke looked up sharply, but it was Anders who answered. 'You will not touch him.'

And cringed at the rolling echo, before the indignation battered past his defence and filled him with certainty.

'This is not about law and the consequence for breaking it. You of all people must understand the law in this city no longer delivers justice. The law has become a shield behind which the perpetrators hide, where those who need that shield instead suffer without. Vengeance is all that can be achieved where law is corrupt. I will not permit you to interfere. I have learned regret this side of the Veil, and I will regret stopping you here, but I will regret many things I do and these deaths would be the least.'

Aveline's guards turned to their captain, tension in the air as they readied to draw.

Her voice was level, low. 'Dead templars cannot be hidden, especially in addition to the others we found earlier today, dead in Darktown's tunnels with the body of a mage amongst them. Unless you want another of Meredith's purges as a consequence of their discovery, and these,' Aveline's brow furrowed, 'both lots of corpses in pieces strongly suggestive of an abomination's attack, what do you suggest that will not hurt more of the innocents whose interests you state to serve?'

Fenris had been looking at him throughout, Anders realised suddenly, eyes a dark glitter through swollen lids. Now Fenris looked away, the tension in that body gone, as if some fear had faded.

Hawke let go of Fenris' hand, stood, ripped shirt and raw confidence rendering his moment of pain and helplessness into myth. 'Put them in the Blooming Rose, in the room which caught fire. I'll char them to the bone, and let Meredith explain why her men were frequenting a brothel's lower dungeons.'

Aveline's mouth thinned. Anders/Justice said, 'This is likely satisfactory.'

Then Anders was suddenly, painfully tired, the rage and fissures flooding away.

'So I see,' Anders said to his demon, bitterly, 'it's lies and hypocrisy which please you. All this time I was trying for--'

'Yes,' Hawke said. 'Do tell us exactly what you've been up to, Anders.'

Aveline actually touched him, the tilt of her chin both aggressive and concerned, as if expecting to put him down, but gently.

'You didn't deserve that, Aveline. I'm sorry.'

'My guards see me stand down a proud --spirit threatening their deaths.' Aveline's mouth quirked. 'There's credibility to be earned in such things.'

At last given direction, the guards attended to corpses with native efficiency, sand muddled into the blood, bodies rolled into canvas. Anders slumped tiredly until they were nearly all gone, Hawke with Aveline, one guard sweeping stained sand into the street, and the smell of lingering smoke and metal. They left him with Varric and Fenris, the latter clothed in blood and nothing else, and nowhere else to take him but Hawke's.

'You wearing anything under that coat, Blondie?'

Hadn't he done enough?

Easier to bend to necessity. He was accustomed to it. Unbuckle his coat with fingers cracking a stranger's blood. Shivering in shortsleeves and trousers, Varric looking at him thoughtfully. Even this move was one of practice, placing the coat beside Fenris, rolling the near-catatonic form into it in two brisk, short moves. Wrap and lift, with a crack of his knees. Hold.

Fenris muttered rich Arcanum, voice raw. But his chin was tucked in, cheek against Anders' chest through two layers of fabric, unmoving.

'Is he--'

'Insisting he can walk? However did you guess.'

Varric's worry disappeared at that, of all things, lips softening into not quite a smile. 'You need anything or anyone to help out, send Bodahn down to find me.'

'Help out with Fenris? He'll be out murdering helpless templars again in no time.'

Fenris muttered more Arcanum into Anders' chest, fingers tickling through linen.

'Don't say that. You don't owe me anything.'

This time the curiosity in Varric's eyes could go unanswered.

The anteroom of Hawke's estate had been dark. Inside the great hall Fenris said clearly, 'Hurts.'

Bone and tendon shaking, lyrium glinting through dried blood. His hand clawed over his eyes. The fire was blazing for once, for Carver's attendance at dinner; the chandelier with fresh candles, lanterns ringing the room. But even so, it was bright if only in comparison to the dim night outside.

There was wet on Fenris' cheeks. He kept trying to open his eyes, only for pain to force him to shut them again. So much to see he could not see any of it.

Anders remembered what that felt like after months of darkness.

'Master Anders?' Bodahn stood in the doorway to the kitchen wiping dishwater hands on a chequered cloth, his whole face twisted with concern. 'Is that...?'

'Lyrium,' echoed Sandal happily, from the kitchen. Fenris struggled at that, a pained protest issuing so quiet only Anders heard it.

Suddenly he did not know what to do.

The opulence in the upstairs bedrooms might well be too much after whatever cell Fenris had known. Gilt blinding as flame. But Anders could not put him into a room downstairs. Servants' quarters had no windows. He suspected windows would be very important.

'Leandra's room. Can you make it ready?'

Bodahn's eyebrows climbed.

Cleared not a week after Lady Amell's death, pale walls and white stone floors, only the thick brocade still shrouding the large window as a reminder of a personality otherwise erased by Hawke, one sleepless night, her memory, name, and motivating principle.

'Shouldn't take long,' Bodahn said, cheer hiding his surprise. 'Fresh sheets and...a bedpan, towels. I'll get...food, fresh water. Food for--'

Bodahn took pity on the awkward silence and disappeared upstairs.

'Broody,' Varric said.

This time Fenris' noise was unrestrained, disgruntled and deep, almost familiar. He had never liked the nickname. Twisting violently, he thrashed weakly, and Anders could only spare him the uncouth drop by sinking to his knees, Fenris shoving away and standing--

Teetering. His palms went flat to the table, hipbone striking the edge with a dull thud.

Fenris breathed very quietly, so shallow and fast Anders did not know how he stayed conscious. The coat slid along his shoulders, knotted spine, each stripe of rib straining against his skin.

Anders averted his eyes.

'Broody,' Varric said again, softly. 'Before I go, Fenris. Let me that thing off your neck.'

A hiss of assent. Fenris' careful descent was dignified from a collapse only by Varric's presence. The lock came off with an almost insulting ease.

Fenris took the stairs on his own, too, bare feet silent on each tread, both hands on the balustrade. Anders felt each time the vertigo and disbelief struck Fenris, seeing the throat bob with each desperate swallow, the sweat prickle on the stubbled scalp, droplets trembling before they fell. But it was just a flight of stairs, just Fenris' confused sense of balance, just rotted muscle. Bodahn had lit two dim lanterns in Leandra's room, the oil burning sweetly. The bed had no pillars, no drapes.

Fenris struggled all the way to the far side before climbing in, refusing to show his back. Plucking at the sheets with an old man's hands. 'The door stays open.'

'Of course,' Bodahn said.

'And the...' a look of panic, as Fenris could not find the word. 'Glass.'

Bodahn looked caught. 'It'll be cold--'

'You will open the glass,' Fenris said with an edge. The words sounded foreign, and hard won.

Anders remembered that feeling, too. In two steps, he pulled back the brocade and flung the casements wide.

'I would like to wash my hands,' Fenris said.

Because Anders had been avoiding looking at the dark marks imprinting pale sheets, he looked now, and felt again the disturbing, upsetting glee. That Fenris now had reason to hate templars? What did it matter? Glee was no more comforting than pity.

'I'm going to find Hawke,' Anders announced. 'Bodahn, you'll be all right with our lordship's demands?'

'Nn,' Fenris said, which sounded too much like no, his eyes seeking out Anders, who avoided them.

'Certainly, Master Anders.'

'No,' Fenris said, which sounded too much like a plea.

Indiscriminate avoidance; his special skill. Downstairs he stopped, caught by the sight of the collar Varric had left. His hand did not shake as he picked it up, the inside ring buttery with old sweat and skin.

Not knowing why he took it with him, except he had been dismayed to see such a potent thing abandoned.

The Blooming Rose's basement smoked from several discreet entrances. A guard recognised him in the square and pointed him through. 'Hawke and the Captain are through that one.'

Anders covered his nose and mouth with the proffered wet cloth and descended.

Even with less spectators, he wondered how templar bodies could have been carried unremarked. A long corridor, doors in sooty alcoves. The bulk of the noise came from the boiler room, where Lusine and Harlan shouted through their wet cloths at the mess of tangled Tevinter metal. The floor was damp there, drainage grates to the sacrificial room having served their purpose. Most smoulder was from the shoring to the floors overhead. Dwarven engineers were already about the corridors, kicking at the wood and cursing human propensity to compromise the structural brilliance of the ancients so carelessly.

Anders walked through the tangle without interruption. The corridor curved and descended, an auger into the earth. Two guards pacing up from the depths nodded in recognition.

'Last door on the left, serah.'

Aveline and Hawke and Aveline's armour filled the pitiful space within.

A warm room. A bed, mattress thin and seeping. A heavy table on its side, as if knocked by the water. A chair, also on its side. No windows, but Anders expected that.

The looks on their faces, not so expected.

Aveline said, 'Anders, we think this might have been where they kept him.'

The walls were thick enough there was no stony echo.

And why not? The synchronicity of tonight reoccured. 'Someone has a sense of humour.'

'I'm not laughing,' Hawke growled.

Abruptly, Anders took in the space around him. Sickened. Kept him, Fenris, not even with Anders' hour of sanity for succour, his one hour in a courtyard at night with a square of featureless sky, spikes atop the high walls keeping away the birds.

His mouth was dry. The wrapped corpses were arrayed within line of sight of the door.

He said, 'I see the irony.'

'I also have a sense of humour,' Aveline said, flatly.

Hawke had been chipping at one wall with his dagger. With some effort, he prised a long nail free and held it, considering.

Then he flung it away, wiping his palm on tattered shirt. 'They actually thought this through. Right under my nose.'

Anders saw then, the metal pinpricks through the door which he had not bothered to parse on entry. More, glittering from the walls where Hawke prised his prize, winking at him. Metal which resisted Fenris' phasing, no doubt, because he would not have worn the metal collar Anders now held in his hands if there had been any way to free himself.

The crate of thick glass flasks by the door, a smaller crate of vials and stoppers but empty, matching those two which Hawke had found and broken. Some had travelled, lifted from the crate by the rising water.

Sodden, rotting velvet puddled on the floor.

The table had not tipped to its side. Placed there. Locks and bars on its underside. Anders flinched at the sight. There were a fair few pillories in Denerim for public mortification.

'They didn't even let him use the bed,' Anders said weakly.

Hawke cursed and kicked something else across the room, the shape of which made Anders recoil from understanding. 'They didn't even let him eat!'

The floor had a dark slick of slime scarring the stone, having soaked in deep enough to resist the boiler's overflow, shining thickly, suggestive of where a figure would have squatted when locked in the pillory.

Aveline crouched in the corner and held a lump to the light. Her face was pale, lips pinched. Anders kept his hysteria where it belonged. Why did they lock him in a room with a rotting skull?

Hawke looked closely. 'The ears. Not many with ears only partly pointed like that. Like Feynriel. Instead of the usual paternal dominance.'

Locked in a room in the dark with Danarius' skull.

Hawke held the jawbone in place and clacked it against the uppers, until Aveline overcame her shock and tossed the skull on the pile of templars. She gave Hawke a meaningful look until he likewise surrendered the jaw. 'We have a job to do here.'

Hawke began with a drifting spark to set the bodies smoking. Aveline immediately ran along the winding corridor. 'Martial all guards, it's flaring up again--'

Calm, the expression on Hawke's face. He stood outside the room's door, holding Anders at his side. The next fireball peeled canvas from skin like giftwrapping.

With smoke licking the ceiling, the room and its scattered horrors appeared both smaller and less meaningful. The walls and the dark and the silence were solid as wax.

'Where is he? Why did you leave him?'

Small, in a big white bed. Anders did not want to pity him.

'He's sleeping,' he rubbed his nose, queasy.

Hawke's next volley evaporated the damp, set the bed on fire, and the cursed pillory. Metal pinged in the walls. 'Care to add something to this?'

'Are you trying to bring down the ceiling?'

Hawke looked askance, then said, 'Does Justice want to add anything?'

Anders closed his eyes. Yes. Every other body of every other templar in Kirkwall, the well meaning and the hapless youngsters. A fireball which would drain all mana, likely his blood as fuel as well. A rage which would open the whole of Hightown's Chantry-kissing hypocrisy to the sky.

'Dead is dead. Let Fenris hold his triumph in his own hands.'

'Cold comfort,' Hawke said, and pulled a firestorm into being.

Hawke iced the fire when the far bulwark cracked, after flames took hold and before the flames made them gag. They left via another entrance, the Rose's subterranean routes as layered as the subtext of her patrons. Aveline's return echoed after them long before they saw her, long after they could have seen her and her requisite witnesses carrying buckets.

Anders lagged. Hawke pulled him on.

'What's wrong with you? Is it still Justice? You look-- itchy.'

Anders did not know. Itchy was a fair word. Fingers could not scratch. 'It's the human smoke in my hair.'

They arrived together into a dank hole in Darktown. Hawke took his arm and led him briskly to the estate's cellar entrance. The hall's fire had been banked, the smell of stew aged to must.

'He's sleeping,' Bodahn said quietly. 'Please don't wake him.'

Hawke's shoes were still his house shoes, soft on the stairs as he flew upwards. His shirt was still torn. He was grimed with smoke, cobwebs, blood. Exactly a comforting picture. Perhaps for Fenris he would be. Knights in shining armour had hardly done him well.

'Messere Fenris did not settle easily,' Bodahn added.

Anders trudged up the stairs, reluctant. Hawke disappeared into his own bedroom, reappearing in seconds. Fast for a mage. He went for Anders with anger and confusion mingled, masked suddenly with blankness

'Where--'

Revelation came sharply, followed by anger. 'Did you think I would put him in your bedroom? In your _bedroom_ , after I healed what they did to him?'

Fenris said, 'Hawke.'

Or perhaps he coughed.

Bodahn have given him Hawke's fourth best shirt. It was white, Leandra's embroidery touching cuffs and collar. Casually, Fenris leaned against the doorframe of Leandra's room. He was so clean Anders smelled the soap. His stubble glinted silver.

'This.'

Fenris was never uncertain.

'This is a dream,' Fenris tried.

Hawke went and embraced him. Fenris' arms did not move. His knuckles were white, fingers clamped around the doorframe.

'This is a dream. And forgive, forgive. Because I do not want to wake.'

This time Arcanum did not fail him. Anders had always found the language congested.

Fenris said, 'I did not sleep and would not sleep because I would pray when asleep, that I would not wake. What trick is this?'

Anders tasted Anderfels consonants curling bitter, deep and sharp as memories. He smothered the details, but there was no mistaking his shame. The templars likewise unearthed him from his months of Circle burial and he had forgotten their words.

'Hush,' Hawke said. 'I have you.'

The flicker through Fenris' lyrium was so quick it was felt more than seen, but Hawke gasped--

Anders thought, a dark empty room impels.

Hawke was already falling back. Anders did not know when he had stepped forward. Because it had already happened. It had as good as happened since he held Fenris' hands with templar blood warming between them.

Over the coming days, there were opportunities for escape. Who would have reproached him?

A mage healer did not do vigils. The injured party either healed, or the healer was too late. For the good his actions at the Darktown clinic might have done, Anders knew his motivations less honest than even Justice could excuse, had not Justice been as naive as he in those early days.

Anders had never so much as changed a soiled sheet. He attended illness and injury, not people. Fenris had no more which he could heal.

But he brought in an armchair from his room, Carver's old room. A mattress to the corner, his pillows. Anders read, stared out the window, slept, read. Mended his clothes. Tore the crooked stitches and mended them again. His hands were never steady at best.

On a schedule Anders did not understand, Bodahn bustled about regularly, colouring the pale blank room. The dwarf roused Fenris and brought him to the pot with usually good timing. He put cutlery in Fenris' hand and made him eat slowly. Even when the expected death glare returned with full force, Bodahn acknowledged the anger and did not deviate. He moved plates away when Fenris fell asleep mid swallow; retreated with apology when Fenris' lyrium flared.

'Look, I don't think he slept -- at all, really. When they had him.' Anders wished he had never studied Arcanum. Childhood fantasies of Tevinter, had while trapped in a tower. Knowledge forever building more traps. 'If he wants to sleep, should we be waking him so often?'

Bodahn never had a problem with meeting anyone's eyes. 'He was kept in the dark, was he? Of course he was. I wasn't always a surface dwarf, Master Anders. I know about the dark. His body's got to remember the cycles.'

When the waking was violently rejected, Bodahn wiped food from the walls and collected ceramic shards. Bodahn changed sheets and changed bathwater, when his timing and Fenris' nightmares failed them both.

Even knowing what they did to him, Anders would have mocked Fenris by now. He wondered if he should never speak again, full of insults in the face of miracles.

Because he was incapable of praise, Anders accused the dwarf, 'You're inhuman!'

'You have noticed; well done, Master Anders.'

Sleep was a war. Skin twitching and flinching as if plagued by ants, body rigid as a strung bow, Fenris so still it hurt to witness. Hands clenched, lids opening to expose unseeing eyes. Breathing reaching a pitch then choked a shade shy of a scream, Fenris upright in a flash, both hands rising to his throat in a desperation days now belated.

Time. Days. It blurred, Fenris clutching at meaning in fragments. Arcanum devolved into another language, liquid, nothing like Qunlat or Tevene slang. Fenris did not cry for his mother. He never wept. When whatever horror had him wake ripping at bonds not there, his eyes went for Anders first. They watched each other.

Anders wanted. But if he was grieving, he did not know what for. His own helplessness to assist, he thought. It was mortifying. Everything about him was tainted with selfishness.

Fenris had to be tired by now, fighting sleep for so long. Another battlefield he won, waking as sunset sliced through the window. The usual gasp and clutch. He kicked off the sheets to scratch his shin, frantic.

Stopped mid-scratch.

Fenris stared at his feet. He flexed his toes.

He put his hands around his ankles and pulled them close to his body, cross-legged, put his nose to his knee, and his suppleness in that dash of spilling sunset was sudden and peculiar, and moved Anders in a way he did not understand.

'I know where I am. But this still does not feel real.'

This was his longest sentence in their common tongue yet. Anders had no answer.

'Why are you here, mage?'

'Trust you to start with the hard questions.'

Fenris turned his head, still on his knee, to look at Anders.

'Do you want me to go?'

'Hard questions,' Fenris said. 'You had no right to witness any of this.' It was more tired than accusing.

'I didn't think you would want to be alone. And, well. There was no one else who could stay.'

When Fenris had panicked that first night, in Hawke's embrace he ghosted, Anders being the one simply standing there, until the lyrium calmed and the fist eased, and he put fabric between their skins and carried Fenris to bed for the second time, while Hawke asked forgiveness from one who could not give it.

After some time, Fenris said, 'No.'

Even denial could be naked.

Fenris said, 'But I am tired.'

Then there was a miracle in Leandra's bed, sleep without segue, without fighting a war. Fenris had given in.

Came the day when Fenris woke reasonably and naturally at dawn, rolled to one side, and watched dewdrops racing along the window's glass. Anders lay on his stomach on the pallet across the room and watched him in turn. The morning hunger was distant, throat dry but not desperately.

Fenris touched his own mouth with two fingers and traced the shape. When he encountered lyrium, his fingers followed and forked over his chin, rejoining at his throat, where new scars reshaped the old.

They lay apart, apparently safe in the morning's glaze.

'You make much noise, mage.'

'I didn't say anything.'

'Your breath.'

'I refuse to apologise for breathing, even in irony.'

'You do not breathe ironically. You breathe loudly.'

Anders had learned there was a particular weight to those silences when Fenris could not find a path to the right words. A Tevinter child's words striving for a Marcher's adult intent. Their conversations customarily gaped and yawned.

Fenris said, 'All these nights, I would wake in the dark and hear your ponderous breathing, fighting your imaginary darkspawn, and think, ah. That is the mage.'

Which was very nearly gratitude, as naked as denial.

'My darkspawn are not imaginary.'

'No more than your breathing is ironic.' Fenris looked at him a little puzzled. Anders momentarily smothered his offensive breath in his pillow. Because he knew what was coming. 'I am glad you have stayed.'

Or perhaps Anders had just assumed what would come, and was wrong. 'There's no more reason for me to stay here now, of course. You can see that.'

Fenris did not contest. 

Anders ate his breakfast in the kitchen with too much spice and not enough sugar. Hawke sat with him, picking idly through his mail. They did not talk about Fenris' status, even when speaking about Fenris, where questions could only be answered insufficiently or with too much detail, and both paths were an insult. He no longer woke screaming. He fed himself. He talked. He dressed and undressed, and if he fell he cursed like a sailor in three languages then blamed the floor. No smashed crockery for some time. Stopped wetting the bed. Still Fenris would not shut the window, craving the breeze for sanity's sake. Would not shut the door. It had taken Anders some time to notice it, as Fenris relearned to move of his own volition, that Fenris considered his every step to ensure he would never turn his back.

'Lyrium,' Sandal said happily. 'Hello.'

Anders and Hawke looked up. If shock could congeal porridge, Anders would have choked.

'That's not polite, m'boy,' Bodahn said. 'Messere Fenris has a name, just as good as yours.'

'Oh, all right.' Sandal abandoned the carrots he was dicing to sulk, fists on hips. 'But lyrium is better. Lyrium sings.'

'Fenris doesn't sing,' Hawke said, strangled.

'Except for sovereigns,' Fenris said.

Hawke's mouth was at odds with the rest of his expression. He retreated into his letters.

Without fuss, Bodahn put another plate on the table, more gruel than porridge, and made a mug of tea from the brew over the stove, which would have been steaming had he not watered it down.

Fenris took a seat, balanced uneasily on the stool, wincing, leaning forward at an awkward angle. His shoulders sloped like hills. Painstaking, he rolled up the sleeves of Hawke's shirt until the cuffs were above his elbows before lifting the bowl, the spoon, ceramic scraping on wood. If he ate with evident discomfort when he swallowed, if anything other than the bland and tepid caused him more pain, there was no reluctance.

Anders wanted to cheer. Then wondered what part of him lived to condescend even this fragile individuality. He slowed his pace to match Fenris, his dish cooling. Hawke stared at the same letter as when Fenris had walked in, which had only three scribed sentences and a jagged seal.

After he ate, Fenris drank with small, consistent, and continuous swallows until his mug was empty.

It was strange. Anders wanted to take the cup away. Anders wanted to tell him, there will always be more, I swear it.

Fenris said, 'I wanted to let you know before I left.'

'You don't have to leave,' Hawke said immediately.

'That is not the point at all. There is no more reason for me to stay here.' Fenris stood. He put himself between Bodahn and the morning workaday route between stove and trough. Mind on his tasks, the dwarf stopped too close to him, startled, and Fenris lurched an unsteady step to maintain their distance.

'Everything I own.' Fenris' voice cracked. 'Everything I legitimately own. It is yours.'

Dishcloth over his arm, Bodahn appeased with his palms. 'That's not necessary, if I can say so. Not necessary at all.'

'There are things no one should have to do for another, nor endure, not fits of temper, or threats...or.' Fenris licked his lips. 'You...were not even my friend, to do such service for me.'

Bodahn looked for an escape. 'We could be friends, if you prefer?'

'I don't know. I would not have expected this from a friend either. I would not have liked a friend to see me...' Now Fenris was dogged, sabotaged by his own intent. He avoided looking at Hawke, at the breakfast table, intense avoidance a point and shout.

Anders chipped at his porridge. Fenris had nearly killed Hawke just for touching him. In the arms of his antagonist, nothing. Handled by a near stranger, only fits of pique and discomfort.

'All I need Messere Hawke already provides, for me and my boy,' Bodahn said firmly.

Fenris nodded as if committing to war. 'Then I owe you my thanks.'

'And it is my pleasure to accept.' Bodahn shook Fenris' hand in relief, both of his wrapped around the elf's thin fingers. 'A pleasure, too, messere, to see you on your feet again, the best of rewards.'

'You're not just walking out,' Hawke said.

Fenris set his back to the wall by the kitchen exit. He would have to turn to leave, a moment of vulnerability, his spine to the room. How would he get anywhere, Anders wondered, if he could not trust anyone behind him?

'If I were to suggest you stay,' apparently Hawke said.

Not you, Anders thought, but the words hit the back of his teeth and stayed.

'Hawke,' Fenris said. 'I am not ungrateful. I will bring your clothing back.'

'I thought I had lost you.'

'The whole time,' Fenris said shortly. 'I was two streets away.'

Hawke's shoulders collapsed like empires.

Lines suddenly folded Fenris too, the deep ones between his brows, the myriad fine web of strain threading his expression, emotion tattered and crumpled like an old map. 'I'm sorry. I should not have implied... But I am stubborn. Tired. You give me so much, such acts of kindness and protection, and I have nothing of value to give you in return. You have my friendship. You have my sword,' his mouth twisted, 'when I can again wield it. But you cannot hold me here.'

Hawke walked stiffly past Anders, Bodahn, and the sulking Sandal, to put his hands on Fenris' shoulders.

With Hawke moving first, they embraced, and if Fenris' attitude was a parody of carved wood, Hawke instinctively waited until Fenris took his next whole breath. The scene warmed, and Fenris' arms tensed around Hawke's shoulder and waist, though the space between them stayed shaped like brothers, not lovers, and Anders shuddered in tainted gratitude.

'Wouldn't dream of it,' Hawke said. 'You need anything, you know where I am.'

None of this halted the inevitable. Fenris stepped through the threshold sidelong. He looked at Anders once and closed the door.

Hawke resumed his place and his reading. 'Nothing to say? You sat in his room long enough.'

That last look at been a piercing stare, a readiness to navigate treacherous waters. Had Fenris known that Anders held his hand through the worst? Such militant will Fenris could demonstrate in an intake of breath, forcing normality through panic and natural instinct; he had just walked out, as if it was easy. How easy it would be to hate him for the appearance of strength.

'Just hoping you're not going to regret unleashing him. You know. What with all the wild animal tendencies. He's like to kill someone if they come up on him from behind. Maker knows what he might do in the dark.'

'Should I shoulder responsibility for his actions? I have a hard enough time justifying my own.' Hawke's expression hardened. 'Or yours. Shoulder your own burden.'

Anders touched his arm.

'Sorry,' Hawke said. 'That was mostly uncalled for.'

Anders let the mostly slide. 'I'm sorry as well, you know that.'

'You play brother better than Carver,' Hawke admitted, and softened to smile.

'I'm going after him.'

'I thought so,' Hawke said.

To Anders it was not improbable. But he might as well have stepped through the kitchen door to a different Kirkwall.

Anders found no trace through a day of searching. Templars were everywhere, and Anders knew what panic the uniform could incite, crossing every sense, sight, the metal smell, the noisy jingle, the chill of touch and grit of taste. No sanctuaries. He did not want to think of the damage Fenris could do in such a state, but thought of it regardless, the torn bodies, Alrik's neatly sundered jaw.

Now he walked through a taproom of strangers. Rationalised, his gesture was a little feeble.

He knocked for attention only; the door was open. 'Was your offer genuine? I need help.'

'We all knew that.' Varric gestured broadly, replete at in his gaudy den, the papers before him momentarily abandoned. 'Take a seat. What do you want me to do?'

'Say, "Leave it to me, Blondie, I'll find him."'

'So Fenris went for a walk? Not unexpected. But he's a big boy, he killed five templars.'

'Except this time someone innocent might get hurt. He's not...safe.'

'Fenris has never been. You never wanted him locked up before.'

'I never said I wanted him locked up!'

'I just want to know, what makes you get involved now?'

'Fenris could be hurt.'

'Be still your nurturing heart,' Varric grinned. 'Nothing to do with the vengeful spirit looking for recruits to the mage cause.'

'What? Fenris?'

'Bardic ear, Blondie: if I happen to memorise some lyrical Arcanum life vows muttered late one eventful night, then find someone to translate, it's not my fault.' Varric shrugged. 'Got to hand it to Broody, even half-dead he still gets dramatic timing right.'

'I don't remember,' Anders said abruptly.

'"He'll be out murdering helpless templars again in no time," you said. Fenris says, "Yes--'"'

_\--I owe you my life. I give you their lives for mine. Command me, and I will lay any head at your door with pleasure._

It had been said in delirium. Owning nothing but words, Fenris offered vows like canapes on a tray, his liaison with Hawke littered with such profound statements. It meant nothing, Anders knew that. But at the reminder, the day's sweat chilled on his skin, reminiscent of the unrighteous glee Fenris' promise provoked and the accompanying crushing shame.

Justice never understood shame as anything but an impediment to action.

Enough difficulty keeping Justice controlled; his own expression was beyond him.

Varric spread his palms, as if to say you see? 'I'm wary on Fenris' behalf. I've been reminded you and Hawke don't have the best track record when it comes to not using your friends.'

'Isabela,' Anders said, though he did not want to. 'I take it you've had word.'

'Heh. Not your business any more. Or Hawke's.'

'Shit, Varric. It was the city or her. I don't blame Hawke for her actions, no more than I blame him for what the Qunari did.'

'If it had been you whose life the Arishok wanted?'

'If it was my life for the lives of everyone in this city, then yes, I would have faced the consequence, without putting a knife in Hawke's back!'

'I'm supposed to believe those bonny blue eyes?' Varric's chuckle flowed through the indignation like water.

Because shame had been the only emotion Justice had never known how to subvert. Anders felt the pulsing presence fade.

'Isabela was Fenris' friend,' Anders said bitterly. 'If she's done submitting to the Qun, send her to help him. If you decide I'm permitted to care, I'll be with Hawke.' He stood.

Varric stopped him from leaving with a single beseeching palm. 'I know that, Blondie. The question you've never really answered for me is why.'

Anders blundered again; Varric's verbal traps were plain, visible, and impossible to avoid. 'Everyone else left Hawke.'

'Yeah,' Varric drawled. 'After he told us all to piss off when we called him out after Isabela.'

'Maybe I'm not so thin-skinned as the rest of you.'

'You and him make sense if the pair of you were still active with the Underground. But you're not any more, Meredith's crackdowns put a stop to that. What happened to the pair of you, your grand intentions to free all the mages?'

'Ask him yourself. I'm here out of concern for Fenris.'

Varric laced his fingers, raised his eyebrows in disbelief, and waited.

'One day, Varric, you might surprise yourself and write something original.'

'Sure. And no one will read it. Give me the motivations.'

Anders counted from smallest finger to thumb. 'Fenris walked out. Isabela blamed Hawke when the Arishok took her. You lot dropped him like trousers. Fenris "left". Leandra died because no one would help Hawke find her. You made him beg for your help, and she still died. You know the only one of you lot who went to comfort him, after? Aveline. I bet that would have been as comforting as a stone pillow.'

Varric contemplated the information as if sampling wine. 'I'll keep an ear out for Fenris and let you know. Because, regretfully, Isabela isn't an option.'

'Thanks ever so.'

'Sarcasm doesn't help anyone, Blondie.'

Word came early enough the next morning Bodahn had to wake him for the message. Anders washed his face in cold water, checked Hawke had not drowned in a bottle or the more usual mountain of paperwork, then went to collect Varric and head to the alienage.

Merrill was neither prepared nor altogether pleased to see him.

'Hawke's little wolf has a dreadful new haircut. I told him so. He just kept walking.'

She had been the first to turn after Isabela. Anders could still remember the anger and hurt on her face, the resolve. _Lethallin, I would have burned your worthless city to the ground to keep that one good soul safe. All stone will fall._

The eyes didn't accuse, strong enough they didn't need to. Anders found it easier to talk over Merrill's shoulder to the body stirring in her inadequate bed. 'And when were you planning on telling us? I seem to remember you did promise your brother.'

The sheet was insufficient. Carver's big knees poked out, raw. 'Right after I dressed, magey. So back off.'

Varric tried to intercede. 'But what was Fenris doing here, Daisy?'

Merrill threw their breakfast dishes into a pile, then, bereft of duty, her arms folded themselves. 'He stole a lot. Didn't try to hide, just took it.'

'How much?' Anders asked it idly.

'Oh, no. You don't come in here with Hawke's purse and silence us. We want justice, the hahren agrees. He gives us his labour or he gives his time to the city guard in a cell. He has no right to expect favours from the alienage. He's the strongest of us, the strongest elf I have ever met, and in four years Fenris never lifted a finger to help the People when we asked.'

'Templars took Fenris, Daisy. They tortured him all the time we thought he was gone.'

Merrill's face changed, slowly. The sternness slipped away like a sheet. A child's disbelieving eyes turned from Varric to Anders; evidently Varric's storyteller tongue was not to be trusted.

Anders wondered what he could say now, that would preserve Fenris in his absence?

'You're sure,' Carver said dully, unquestioning.

'I...don't think they were escorting him to a function when we found them,' Anders said.

Merrill did not quite wring her hands. 'I'm so sorry. I was insensitive, I had no idea. He looked awful, but I thought... But he was never their enemy, not templars!' A turnabout, the sternness returning, sharp and hard. 'This place, this city, you humans, why is there so much that is hateful here. So much that is heavy. The city should fall in on itself. Why--'

Unexpectedly, Carver said, gentle, 'Don't ask, Merrill. Some things aren't worth knowing why. They're just wrong.'

'Anders?' Merrill turned to him. 'I can track him, he didn't look fit to hide, and he wasn't fast. The sooner we go the better.'

'Track-- He left the city?'

'After he was done looting, yes.'

Anders' heart was a dove. Darktown's extremes of temperature were years forgotten, but not the anxiety at the threat a night could hold.

'In everything he stole, Merrill, did he think to take a blanket?'

But Merrill could not say. 'He looked more interested in finding a sword.'

Pervading the stiff, chilly coastline, the wind was bright, powerful, unrepentant. The ground gave up no secrets to Anders, if it had secrets to give, only evidence of last night's light rain and the natural occurrences of dew and mist sponging the sand clean.

Merrill walked without doubt. It was good to be led again, when Anders' reasons and motive were rinsed out. All that remained was action.

By late afternoon, they came upon Fenris on the leeward of a cliffside curve, arms around his knees, bare feet pushed into sand. He was wrapped in a grey coat and indifferent.

He sniffed at sight of them.

Anders went to his knees at Fenris' side. In relief? He felt dulled. He could not trust himself to stand. 'How far did you think you were going to get?'

'Far enough.'

Fenris coughed, tired.

Varric caught Merrill's hand, drew her and Carver away. 'We're going nowhere tonight, I can tell. Blondie, the cave back around the last bend, the one with the view. When you're ready.'

Anders waited. Below, the ocean whispered against rock, and the wind mocked.

'Kirkwall,' Fenris said. 'I had forgotten...what it was. I could not run fast enough.'

Under the coat, he was still wearing Hawke's shirt. The cuffs were dirty.

'What happened to the sword?'

Fenris smiled, grim. 'Raiders. The metal was cheap. It shattered.'

Now Anders saw the dirt for old blood. 'Are you hurt?'

'No,' then Fenris stopped. 'Yes. Heal me, magister. Or your earlier investment fails to deliver.'

Anders said harshly, 'You're not hurt. Not if you can still throw out insults like that.'

Fenris chuckled.

To the horizon. 'I loved a magister. He undressed me with his eyes, I remember...I was not unwilling. I fell for his power and the opportunity. I was a child and he was an idiot. But I fell. Thirteen years later I woke up in a dark prison and all he had left me was his head. He would have been proud to know even in death he broke me.'

'Maybe you are hurt. Are you fevered?'

Fenris sniffed hugely. 'My head feels like a ball. But you are no templar to cut it off to play your bastardised football before me.' In Arcanum, he snapped, 'This bullshit with the hands on the ball baffles the mind.'

Anders warred with hysteria. 'Danarius would have turned in his grave.'

'If he had one.'

Then Fenris shouted, 'At least Danarius came back for me. What did anyone else ever do for me?' A shudder. 'No. I did not mean it. Do you believe me?'

Anders said, 'I don't believe in much any more.'

Fenris looked at him doubtfully, stubbled lashes and scabbed lids dusted with salt and sand.

'You came for me.'

'You rescued yourself.'

Fenris said, 'You are here now; you came for me. But you hate me.'

'Maybe I did hate you. If I did, I still do. Nothing has changed between us.'

'Well,' Fenris said, 'I am not sure.'

Anders assembled the facts and doubted his cards. He started, stopped, tried again.

'I've lost more bloody silver to you in the Hanged Man than to anyone else. I've lost more time in my life trying to argue and talk with you than with anyone else. Maker knows why. Wardens tend to count those seconds.'

'Huh,' Fenris said. 'You are never scared of me.'

'What? No. Maybe a little.'

'You were never scared of me,' Fenris repeated, with emphasis. 'You argued with me. There have been not so many people who put such weight on my words to hear them. People fear my blade, or my markings...no one else weighs my words as you do. No mage.' He dug a flattened shell out of the sand. 'I...used to deliberately not avoid you.'

Since it was the natural thing to do, Anders flushed. 'Oh. Right. I'm just as perverse, you know. Hawke would ask me along on something, and I'd ask, is Fenris--'

'Your perversity,' Fenris said, 'I know well.'

'I suppose I thought if I could get you to agree with me, then I would know I was right.'

'I am not an agreeable person.'

'So that's where I went wrong.'

Fenris' mouth quirked, shadowed by steepled fingers.

'I never wished anything like this on you,' Anders said quietly. 'But I was so glad when it seemed you had gone, of your own free will. Hawke was learning to listen to you, too. That scared me. You are dangerous. There's not so much power in Kirkwall that I can look away from what Hawke's weight adds to any effort, any more than Meredith could have kept ignoring him. Sometimes just standing next to him, even as he is now, I feel like I'm so close to the making of history I might well suffocate on the stink.'

'I have never wanted anything from Hawke except the right to say no.'

Which required the power to enforce it.

In self-preservation Anders looked for some other object on which to concentrate.

Gravely, Fenris handed him the shell. His fingers were cold, his skin like paper. 'This is where you tell me all you ever wanted was the same thing.'

'Not today,' Anders cupped the offering, afraid.

'Why not?'

'I'm no raider. It won't make you feel any better to pick a fight now, even if you win. It never did with me.'

'Fights have no winners,' Fenris said. 'Only survivors. Only the living know victory. Perhaps that is also where you went wrong.'

But the chill of Fenris' fingers stayed with Anders. Across Fenris' emotion, his skin stretched thin and recalcitrant, and the skin was never any protection against communication. The strain and draw, the huddled posture, the shivers swallowed by the great coat.

'All right, hero. What hurts the most?'

Anders listened to Fenris' lips open and close, the stirring of the sand.

'My back,' Fenris admitted. 'Like fire. I felt something tear as I swung. And inside. I am thirsty.'

'I can't believe you got into a fight. Atrophy doesn't just will away.'

'It worked well enough.' But Fenris' dismissive shrug had him stiffen.

'A hot bath would help that.'

Fenris hesitated.'If I request healing.'

But not today, not the time for Fenris to know. 'A rubdown at camp, a soak tomorrow.'

Fenris' face wrinkled. 'No rubbing.'

'Tomorrow, I'll help you find somewhere legitimate to stay, if your pride insists.'

'My pride does.'

Anders acknowledged, 'Pride does make footballs of the best heads.'

'Let me finish here first.'

Because Fenris had walked and fought to watch the sun rise and set on a horizon unencumbered by city.

Slightly after that, they reached camp. Varric's low fire was tucked from view, tea already made, and an uneaten lunch laid out instead for their dinner. Pain made Fenris function like a stiff hinge, creaking and resistant in rising and lowering.

Because moving was difficult, only when seated did Fenris see who sat by Merrill's side.

But he was still hinged. Anders felt Fenris' pulse lift, face suddenly drawn and lifeless, all while some emotion denied expression lapped the walls of the cave elastically.

Carver did not wear his templar armour on his visits to Merrill, but his greatsword's motif made his allegiance clear. His eyes moved over Fenris unseeing, while his mouth groped after something to say.

Anders sat up straight, clapped his hands together and leaned forward. 'I wish I could say that supper looks good.'

Varric looked between Carver and Fenris and winced. 'But we all know your opinion of hardtack, eh, Blondie? Go on, wax rhetorical about it. You know I love to hear you speak.'

'Varric, you charmer. Pass it over--'

Demons had their ways, Anders heard, but nothing which made him recoil so deep as Fenris' dullness.

'Have you drunk of me too, Carver?'

The words were mild.

Carver dropped his mug of tea, went vermilion, and fumbled his plate.

'I know they sold me. Alrik regularly reported back on profits and margins. Incomings and outgoings. The demand. I know enough of the production process I might well make a fortune of myself. Shall I remove the middleman?'

'I didn't know,' Carver tried.

'Did you know, when you bought their false offer of freedom in a flask?'

'I didn't know,' Carver insisted. 'Until Hawke told me bits and their bodies were discovered and Anders came walking in this morning and Varric made it all come clear, and I was nearly sick on Merrill's floor right then. But they're dead anyway and what does it matter?'

'Will all Kirkwall know this of me? Will I have to dodge and hide these scars forever? Will there be templars behind every smile in the dark?'

There was a flicker of shame, anger, when Carver looked up, so different from his brother by firelight. 'Only if you keep moaning about it. No one cares about anything except themselves. Just shut up about it, know one will ever know.'

Angered in turn, Anders tipped Carver's tea-filled plate back into his lap, the templar yelping. 'You could at least have the decency to be sorry.'

'For what? I never laid a finger on Fenris!'

Fenris' smile stripped the accusation. 'More people benefit from slavery than slavers. Did you drink me?'

'Don't be afraid,' Carver said, 'I have no intention of telling anyone.'

'I am afraid,' Fenris said, 'that I may do you violence if you stay in my sight.'

'You can barely even sit without crying. What are you going to do, spit on me?'

'Will you lap that up, too? Shall I fill your plate and make you drink on your knees?' Anders felt the will forcing through the lyrium beside him with a surge like magic, a flicker less motion than ghost, and Carver was on his back with Fenris at his throat, _in_ his throat. 'Shall I do it now, templar? Right in your face? Spare the vessel and drink it fresh? Will that stop your flapping tongue?'

Merrill roared, 'Enough!'

Anders did not know when he had risen. From across the other side of the cave mouth, Varric threw him his staff.

'Yes,' Varric said, 'listen to Daisy, boys. Bianca hates firing on her friends.'

Merrill brought her hands together and apart, and the smell of dust and forest filled the cave, and the two were separated ungently by her intangible will.

Carver stumbled to his feet, rubbing his throat. Fenris crumpled to his back, the lyrium envelope protecting him, until it shattered.

Fenris groaned. Stopped the sound on its escape. The smell of his sudden sweat was thick with fear and pain.

Anders grounded his staff. 'All right, here's a plan. How about we don't antagonise the invalid?'

Fenris could not turn to glare, but Anders felt it. 

'I don't even know what that was,' Merrill said, 'or what it was for. But what I know is that it is too late for hate to do any good. I do not want anybody else to die, or disappear, or to hurt each other.'

'Hate is always too late,' Fenris stated.

Merrill cupped her elbows, prim. 'Except when it gets you through a lonely night, lets you overcome a fear. But there's too many of us here for loneliness right now, so just stop it, for me if you can't stop for you.'

Hesitating a moment, torn between Merrill and the sternness in her eyes, Carver went to help Fenris rise. 'Come on. I don't hate you, even if you did just try to kill me.'

'I do not try. If I had tried, you would be dead.'

Carver scoffed. 'Hard to believe when you're on your back pissing out with sweat.'

Fenris turned his head stiffly. 'I do not want your hand. Just bury me here.'

'That's not practical at all,' Merrill said. 'The ground is far too hard.'

Anders choked the laugh unborn. Fenris glowered aimlessly, another curse forming unsaid on chapped lips.

'Blankets might be more comfortable, eh Broody? Let's just bunk down and see how it looks in the morning.'

Varric always knew the right thing to say, Anders thought. One way or another. But it was Anders who knelt and moved his hand underneath Fenris' knotted shoulders. In blankets offered freely by the others, Anders wrapped him like a stiff fish, resisting the urge to cross Fenris' arms in funereal pose.

'Are you feeling the fool after that show?' Quiet enough the bodies bedding down on the far side of the cave could not hear him.

'I shall tell you what I feel--' Fenris stopped suddenly, jaw rippling, pulse stark at temple and throat.

'Might it be, quite a lot of unnecessary pain?'

Fenris grunted, but it was almost a laugh.

Finding his own blankets, Anders tolerated the sand itching in his hair, just a sparing thin layer of warmth underneath and over top, his feet sweaty in their boots, robe bunched under his back. If the chill tempted Anders to surface from his drifting, a familiar breathing dominated the silence beside him, and this was enough.

When Anders snapped awake there was no lingering grogginess of broken sleep. Dawn licked at the horizon from beneath, in that unformed light their shapes defined, if colourless.

Merrill's warding glyphs glittered by the cave entrance. Long lashes against her pale cheek, she lay on Anders' right, her lips against Carver's hair. A templar and a blood mage. Every abuse of power Anders had ever witnessed in the Circle lay next to him, sleeping peacefully.

But it was Carver in Merrill's arms, not the other way around.

Sex and power, means and ends, interchangeable and never the same. Anders used to play the game as the only avenue to either end. Terror was better than feeling nothing, and success was more of a rush than magic. If he did not like what happened when he fell, when he misjudged his target's set of rules, well. The broken noses and grit of alleyways was years past, and he had learned to clench his teeth.

It had been almost ten years, Anders thought, in astonishment.

This did not deter any latent desire.

Anders turned his head. In Hawke's once-white shirtsleeves, Fenris was clearly defined against the darkness.

Because Anders was so intent on learning the face, he did not note the wetness spreading dark through the blankets at Fenris' groin, until the time the shafting light reached them and there was no more chance to hide it.

Anders did not know how to live in a world where he felt this for Fenris.

He rose quietly. The pot of tea from the night prior was almost full. He did not heat it, as Merrill's wards would wake her.

Their jailers had been a shared antagonist, but the horror was never the same, because they were different, the dark hole years and miles apart, devouring different months of their lives. Losing their second languages in the long silences which made of them children again, losing everything but pride, and learning belatedly that living for pride alone was a horror all of its own, turning away every hand because pity was the greatest threat. To presume similar experiences would be a mistake, Anders knew.

Anders knew, he had no right to play keeper of secrets when Fenris was - already - bold enough to turn his truths into weapons.

Anders dumped the tea on the wet patch.

Fenris did not scream, but the sound he made on waking was worse. Crying. He did not move or glow or threaten, only flinched himself to a wounded sitting, arms still by his sides, wide eyes blind with shock.

Carver, who slept with his sword, returned the blade to its sheath with a curse. 'What now!'

'Sorry, I went to get a drink and tripped.' Anders held out the empty kettle.

Fenris' eyes darted from kettle to the spreading puddle at his groin. As if only just remembering his arms, he pushed back the sodden blankets uneasily, hands sliding to span the dampness at his trousers.

'I thought someone was murdering someone.' Merrill pressed her fingers against her eyes, 'again.'

'I don't blame you! It was very cold tea. Better than boiling tea, seeing where it landed--'

'What is wrong with you,' Carver said, without a question.

'It was an accident.'

Fenris' hands formed fists. He inhaled through his nose with a deliberate emphasis which made Anders aware that he had stopped.

'Sometimes,' Fenris said unsteadily, 'you behave as if you are quite mad.'

But the eyes were knowing.

Of course Fenris knew. His fingers still plucked his wet trousers in disbelief and disgust. The eyes issued the same challenge Fenris issued in Hawke's kitchen, this time tempered by bemusement, as if at last the elf regained enough of himself to wonder.

Elation made Anders giddy.

'I shall make gallons of tea,' he pronounced. 'Seeing as we're all awake.'

Carver growled. 'Sodding mages with deathwishes.'

Only Varric was still asleep, because Varric could sleep through a taproom brawl.

Walking back, Fenris lagged, breath rattling too fast in the strained throat, feet making long slurring noises through the cold sand. The others outpaced them, Varric with his crossbow on his shoulder and eye on the sky, Carver to the fore and Merrill behind, if never too far.

Far enough.

'No rubbing,' Fenris said quietly. 'No throwing of water. Cold or lukewarm, it was always a shock. I could not see when they were about to-- I was always, not even wet. Damp, dripping. I dreamed of a desert.'

A warm wet room and slime darkening the stone. Anders shuttered the memory; it was not his nightmare. 'I don't plan on making a habit of it.'

Fenris nodded once, though it could have been weariness.

Anders strove not to outpace him.

'I went to the mansion,' Fenris said, between breaths. 'Where I used to live. You and Hawke did not tell me.'

'Oh-- it sold.'

'Where did you think I would go when I left, if not to my home?'

But Fenris had never called it home before. 'I don't know. We didn't expect you to leave so soon.'

'I asked if I might enter. The butler sent me to the servants' door. The housekeeper gave me a dumpling and said there were no positions open.'

'Ah,' Anders said helplessly.

'I ate the dumpling.' Fenris stopped walking. 'I was sick.'

'Of course you were.'

'I am,' Fenris swallowed. Sweat speckled his naked brow. 'Accustomed to surviving. But if I cannot even fight, or eat--'

'Slowly,' Anders told him. 'In small amounts. You used to only eat once a day, if from large enough a plate. You can't do that now.'

'How do you even know--' Fenris almost growled. 'I never had time to eat then, Hawke always--'

'You have time now. He won't hound you.'

Threads of tone and force laced the words into an inadvertent promise. Anders flushed. Fenris looked at him askance.

'Time, but what purpose.'

'Living?'

Fenris' lyrium flashed quicksilver in the sun, and the memory of taste shot through Anders just as quick, and bright, and gone.

'This used to be my reason to live. The pain, then surviving it. But there was pride in individuality and survival and I was proud. Or -- the inverse of pride, which is not shame but something other. That is what I was.' Fenris flexed his fingers, lyrium moving over tendon and bone. 'In their hands-- At times I thought I was no more than a complicated way of moving slop from one bucket to another.'

Anders groped for response. Because Fenris looked at him, having forgotten or never learned that conversation required dialogue, not statement.

'The rest of the time?'

They must have let him out. An hour a day, even an hour a week. A hook where Fenris could hang his sanity, a delicate robe worn only in temperate weather.

'I did not think at all.'

'That's not possible. Not even for you.'

'Just the same,' Fenris said. 'That is what I did not do.'

Anders pulled his hand through his hair, grabbed his queue and yanked, a dull, prosaic pressure across his scalp to distract from the thoughts inside.

'Please stop this. You tell me-- just enough to make me sick, to want to-- But I already told you, I can't make it like it never happened. No healing can.'

The puzzlement on Fenris' face flashed to anger. 'I never asked for this!'

'I'm not saying you did.'

'Do not silence me.'

'But why do you have to tell me? I just can't hear it anymore, it's too--'

Terrifying enough Anders could imagine himself in Fenris' place, and instead of the sulking madman he had been in his Tower cell, the silence eating his words, his one hour of sky for saviour, they had broken him beyond saving. Imagine a place where he did not want to think, where he stopped thinking, where Tranquility would have been salvation. Anders felt his stomach turning, picking fitfully at a breakfast Fenris did not touch. Felt his fragile control threatened, hammered from within by butterflies of steel.

Weak, Anders asked, 'Does waving the truth of it around really help?'

'Hypocrisy from you, mage, to tell me to be silent about truth.'

'I don't talk about me. What happened to me, what might ever happen to me is not important. It's bigger than one person, it's about mages, and Thedas, and the way everyone just accepts mages as commodities, used, handled, enslaved. As if it's normal--'

Weeks and months of carefully constructing the arguments in the manifesto. There had been a time when he could recite those sentences verbatim, sure of the power behind such skilful collections of words, proud of them. Hawke had supported Anders' cause, in ways, but never quite supported Anders; the manifesto had been intended for him, not to save others. The words were smoke. More hypocrisy. Anders had only written them as a substitute for action, a way of keeping Justice satisfied that something productive was occurring, a visible achievement, when the spirit would rather have ridden Anders like a halla and stormed the gates, rallied the mob, lynched the Knight Commander, without thought for consequence to his mortal vessel. Spirits had no concept of consequence.

Hard to admit that all those words, all that paper, had been his only shield between the action vengeance demanded.

When the sense of rage and otherness faded, Fenris was watching him warily.

Anders let his hands drop. His head ached, shadow flicking at the corners of his vision. He checked the sun desperately, but it had not risen so far. Not a long one, this time.

'What did he say just then? What did he make me do?'

'Nothing I wanted to hear,' Fenris said. 'I am no banner for your demon to wave.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I do not want to hear about mages or slaves.' Fenris added, 'But I will hear about you, if you will tell me.'

'What I could possibly say--'

Fenris slumped against the rock wall lining the path, hunch giving way to weakness.

'You act one way. You stay. You protect me, you hide,' he smiled crookedly, 'that I have no control, to the point I wet myself in my sleep, when you could have simply mocked or ignored it. You walk by my side. Then you tell me you don't want to hear me.'

'You keep giving me these looks,' Anders said.

'Tell me what happened to you.'

There was the urge to deny him.

'The templars locked me in solitary for a year.'

Fenris sighed.

'Not saying that this is anything like what you-- I don't know everything you went through, but I know-- Darkness. And the confusion, the strangeness when they just pull you out after and expect you to live like before. I know what it meant to hear someone breathing in the same room after all that silence. So I stayed with you. That's all.'

'Did they rape you too?'

They did not look at each other. Anger was its own shield, but Fenris was not angry now.

That _too_ had cost Fenris something.

There was the urge to deny him so thick and strong, and Anders looked it in the eye and said, 'No.'

He said, 'Not like that. I was promiscuous before they sent me down, and...it would have been no hurt to me, even as rough as they could-- I played sex like it was a game, had more than a few templars punished, demoted. Sent away before they could harm others less savvy than I. Because I was so knowledgeable, you see. So willing to wear the shame and the bruises openly, like medals. See what I could do? All with a smile and a flick of my hair, and the fact that I did not cry out until the right ears would hear. It was the only weapon I had that I was permitted to use.'

Fenris did not flinch from the bitterness. Fenris said, 'Yes.'

'So they knew me, you see? They were not permitted to say a single word to me down there. To touch me at all. They were always in full armour, two of them exactly the same height, same weight, helm in the way, nothing mortal in them at all. It was so carefully considered, can you imagine? Comparing heights just so they could ensure there would be no way for me to name them anything but templar.'

Fenris said, 'I do not need to imagine.'

'They escorted me into a courtyard at midnight every night and locked me there for an hour while they -- the Tranquil, some unlucky bloody sod, cleaned the cell of anything I'd done. Wiped on the walls. You know what it's like.'

Fenris said, 'I know what it's like.'

'Then back to the cell to find it as meticulously clean and cruel as if I had never existed within, and a fresh plate of food and water. Filth might degrade, but that cleanliness was a weapon I never would have dreamed in my worst nightmares. The moon was never in sight in that yard, and I could make no marks that stayed, no...knots in a thread of hair, nothing. So I never knew how long. They had me. Or if they would ever let me out. And after a point logic stopped meaning anything as an internal argument for the fact of my freedom, and I stopped believing anything would ever change. That it had ever been different. That I deserved anything other than what I had got.'

Fenris examined the sand and asked, 'Did you fight?'

Yes. Oh Maker, yes. He could remember the fights he fantasised about. Coming to the thought of a sword through his stomach. Anything hot, anything warm. Anyone.

'They constrained me, bound my arms to my side.'

Anders felt his breath stop, caught on the knot of a thought left undone. Maker. He had forgotten that. How could he forget that?

'The whole time?'

'After I snapped the first time, yes.'

After he had nearly killed one of them, refusing to use to the magic they wanted to entice him into using so they could kill him, sanctioned and all. Who was more surprised, him or them, that hatred and desperation and bare hands thwarted even their armour, any reasonable mortal compunction to avoid death or killing shattered by the long months alone.

And he had forgotten it.

Fenris nodded slowly, as if all of this had been said and seen.

Then he said, calm and prosaic, 'There are some pains different to the rest. A pain that says, when I move my arms that I should not be moving my arms at all. Not stabbing, a fist with a knife, not cutting or muscular ache. More as if the finger of the Maker had come, pushed this place precisely and put there an unarguable wrongness.'

'You're arguing right now.'

Fenris turned his hand and wrist, flexed his elbow. He smiled. 'That does not contest that the wrongness is still there.'

'May I--' Anders was already offering, one palm out, too late to withdraw.

Fenris ceded his back.

Only when Anders was tracing the knotted line of threadbare muscle did he remember the vulnerability in the bent neck before him, the breath which quickened, shallow and fearful. He kept his touch light.

But in this, Anders' knowledge was limited. If Fenris had been proud, Anders had been worse. Anything a healer could not heal was not worth his hours.

The Maker made Anders a healer. Everything else was Anders' own fault.

Anders begged, pleaded, with the part of him that rejected the healer's mandate. Battered against the block impotently. But vengeance would not yield.

'I'm sorry, I can't--'

'No matter,' Fenris said. 'I will bear it.'

'Was there numbness?'

'Yes,' Fenris said. 'Often. As if ants crawled inside my skin and bit. And when I thought that pain would peak, then there was nothing. My limbs like lead, as if they were no longer mine.'

'But the feeling came back? Everywhere?'

'I would move until it did.' Fenris laughed, unpracticed and clumsy and breathless. 'Then regretted it. Sensation was not necessarily a blessing.'

He added, 'But I think I was tiring of the fight, towards the end.'

Fenris trailed off, the lack of certainty terrible.

Perhaps, Anders thought, the Maker reached down occasionally and burst the pipes of ancient Tevinter boilers.

'I think, so long as you can still feel everything now, this will get better on its own. There's no numbness now?'

'Only the pain,' Fenris said.

Still Anders' fingers pressed through Hawke's dusty shirt, finding too-warm flesh beneath.

'There is another,' Fenris said.

'Tell me.'

'Lower.'

Anders did not pick up his hand and place it lower. His fingertips found the path, feeling rib and fluttering breath. The fine pale hairs on Fenris' nape stood on end, darkening as they descended, and his breath was almost a sob.

'There--'

'Your spine?'

'No, inside.'

Anders put his palm flat against the boiling skin and begged and pleaded and prayed, without release.

'They abused this place to make me come.'

Anders recoiled and retracted, stomach twisting, sympathetic hurt making his skin crawl. 'I told you not to-- tell me details.'

Fenris did not move, still facing away, hunched. 'I want you to know.'

'Why?'

The silence gaped and yawned again, wind whistling through bone, until Fenris found his reasons. 'Because then it is been and done.'

'I can't believe you would want this, were you yourself. You don't even like me. Give it time, let it pass. You won't want me to know later. You'll wish you never told me anything.'

'I don't like you,' Fenris said. 'If I told anyone else I would get pity. I tell you and I get freezing water poured on my groin, and your snoring in my room at all hours, and your insistence that nothing has changed, and your hands over your ears while you pretend to argue with your demon in order not to hear me, and you will not even heal me, only touch and fondle and cringe when you realise who you touch. I do not want a shoulder. I do not want coddling. You, pathetic you, I can accept.'

'I'm flattered,' Anders said. 'One day I expect this will stop being awkward.'

'What?'

'You wanting me around.'

Fenris' posture eased. 'I also want what you owe me.'

'And what might that be, beyond my discomforting presence?'

'Varric will know.' With visible effort, Fenris straightened, took a step. 'They are waiting, ahead. You talk too much.'

'That was low, even for you. I expect more wit before I'll condescend to be insulted.'

Fenris' mouth curved. 'I shall not strain myself.'

They rejoined the others, Carver eyeing the surroundings suspiciously, as if Kirkwall were not within eyeshot and even raiders not so bold to tackle a bare-armed templar. Merrill contemplated the city below with an expression almost wistful, buildings hazed like the breath of an early morning. Varric picked at his nails and whistled quietly, hip against a convenient outcrop of rock, his eyes faraway as if piecing together a tale.

'The mage owes me,' Fenris announced. 'I wish to collect.'

The three turned to look.

'That he does,' Varric said thoughtfully. 'I'm not sure he would want the amount bandied about before every ear.'

'You're talking about diamondback--' Anders did not know if he was relieved.

'C'mere, Blondie.' Varric wore a grin suspiciously gleeful.

Anders bent, then flinched at the divulgence. He glared at Fenris.

'You could set yourself up for a year with that!'

'Not quite a year.' Fenris sounded, looked almost smug, even listing to one side with inch-long white fuzz broken into ridiculous locks by old lyrium, the cheeks still too hollow and eyes shadowed.

'Don't forget you went around promising your material possessions to assorted Hawke servants.'

'The offer was rejected.'

'Where do you think you're going to stay, anyway?'

Merrill said, 'This is probably a terrible time to mention the alienage.'

Fenris turned away from Anders with obvious reluctance.

'Except if you needed somewhere to stay, no one looks twice to see an elf in the alienage. Not even templars. I mean, if they haven't noticed me yet...' Merrill turned to Varric, who raised his palms.

'Don't look at me, Daisy. Coterie or carta, I'm your man. But the templars listen to a higher order than a simple dwarven merchant.'

'No templar will be looking for Fenris,' Carver said.

'And I should trust a recruit, that he knows the intent of his superiors?'

'Don't think I'm naive, just because they don't trust me yet. I listen. If they ever knew who you were, it was because of my brother, not because of the lyrium.'

'I would walk through your Gallows,' Fenris said, 'and feel every templar helm turning to watch me pass. Tell me, Hawke, you cannot feel the lyrium, even now, at this distance. You templars hold that all of this is yours by right. Why should I not expect that now templars and magisters both would try to reclaim what they think is theirs?'

Carver flushed, and mumbled, 'Most of that would have been because of your bloody armour. You didn't exactly try to hide what you were.'

'What he is,' Merrill said gently. 'Because I really don't think a haircut changes someone that much. Even a terrible one.'

'I should not have to hide,' Fenris said. 'I will not.'

Carver fished for words. Merrill went and patted his arm, almost parental.

'Sorry,' Carver said unwillingly. 'You're allowed to be a distrusting son of a bitch. Don't let me stop you.'

'That's better,' Merrill said. 'Each of us to our own mistakes.'

'The alienage,' Fenris said, and did not twist his mouth.

'There's a place recently freed.' Merrill beseeched through her fringe. 'I'll be close, which means Varric will be close, if you need anyone to get you out of there quickly. I mean, the headman already knows who you are, he knows the elvhen-- every elf in the city. He'll keep the peace for so long as you do. There's not so many places you could stay in Kirkwall where you would be left as alone. I asked Varric. We think, even if you tried the Hanged Man or the other inns, someone would have to pick a fight with Hawke's vanguard.'

'You did leave a reputation,' Varric added.

'A deserved one,' Fenris growled, 'which you abetted, scribe.'

'Insult me all you want,' Varric said easily. 'It just goes into the next book.'

But Fenris already looked thoughtful.

Carver shook his head. 'Maybe in a year or so you could stand by that reputation again. Not now.'

'I deplore the alienage,' Fenris said, 'and its inhabitants.'

'They don't like you very much either,' Merrill said shortly. 'But they'll still have you. The headman said so, when you came walking in yesterday and took all our stuff without so much as a word.'

Sneaky. Anders took a moment to wonder what Merrill's running diamondback balance might be. He could not recall a game from those long-past sessions, Isabela sparkling in their midst, where Merrill had lost except to Isabela.

'Those elves given or born into their freedom yet spend it on such an existence, in an alienage, drunk and without ambition. Waiting for to be picked off by slavers, conveniently in one location. It-- makes no sense to me.'

Carver shadowed Merrill's shoulder protectively. 'Because being drunk and with one murderous obsession while squatting in a Hightown mansion is a much more superior existence, of course. You fooled me.'

Fenris did not speak.

'Fenris,' Merrill said. 'Nobody is free. Everything worth something costs something.'

Varric looked proud. 'That was beautiful, Daisy. We'll make a dwarven merchant of you yet.'

'Oh, I already knew that before I came to Kirkwall,' Merrill said blithely. 'I'm not a child, Varric. I made my bargain with a demon, remember? I bet Fenris remembers.'

'Did you get what you wanted,' Fenris said, without emphasis.

'No,' Merrill said. 'I wasn't willing to pay full price.'

Varric chuckled, even as Carver busied himself studying the horizon, unwarily pale cheeks reddening again. In professional embarrassment this time, Anders assumed.

'I have been arrogant,' Fenris said. 'Now I have no recourse. I will go to the alienage.'

'Well,' Merrill said, 'don't make it sound like you're doing us a favour, because you're not.'

'Social capital only stretches so far,' Varric added, still chuckling. 'Oh, Broody. Never change.'

Then there was Kirkwall, just as unchanged and unchanging, oblivious of its chains.

Fenris was already sloping off in Merrill's wake, Varric by their side, Carver at their back this time, in a chaotic Kirkwall morass where a backstab or pickpocket was more likely than a raider's sword to the fore, looking oddly like a mabari herding the trio.

'Fenris, wait.' Privacy in a crowd was almost impossible. Anders affected ignorance of the flow. 'Are you sure about this?'

'Where else shall I go?' Fenris was calm. 'This is enough.'

Not Hawke's, was unsaid.

'If you need something--'

'I do. My coin.'

'I'll get it to you,' Anders said, exasperated. 'I meant--'

'I thought you did not want to listen.'

'You've made it abundantly clear you don't care what I want.'

Fenris put his hand on Anders' upper arm. 'I am not grateful.'

Even his palm was luridly hot, searing through cloth, a desperate grasp.

Anders thought, I know this game. The opposite of the truth.

'And you do not want me to come and see you,' Anders surmised.

Fenris nodded his head. 'No. I am -- not grateful.'

'The truth,' Anders acknowledged, 'is often ungrateful.'

Fenris' hand tightened and released. He turned away.

Anders looked at the stubborn line of the spine, swamped by an over large coat, and said without thinking, 'Wait.'

He had one arm out and open before Fenris even turned back, because he could not help but push, and because his staff was in his other hand.

'It's not a shoulder,' Anders said.

Fenris would be bone and sinew against him, Anders thought, and ravening heat, and a throbbing heartbeat which battered through ribs and flesh and fabric alike until it felt like Anders' own, thin arm marking a tremulous path across Anders' spine and hooked over his shoulder from behind, as if Anders was suddenly the only thing keeping him standing, and there would be no space between them.

Except Fenris just looked at him, then lowered his head.

'I know,' he said. 'I am sorry.'

'It's all right,' Anders dropped his arm, stiff and heavy. 'It'll keep. Don't forget the hot bath. Top it up with elfroot. Boil the water in there before you drink it.'

'Don't forget my coin.'

'How much of it do you owe Varric, I wonder?'

'Enough.'

'How much is he actually going to see?'

Then Fenris graced him with a dark, brilliant grin, flashing teeth just as crooked as the smile, quite contrary to the grave tone. 'That, you should not need to ask.'

Rounded up by Carver's broad back and dogged ways, swept alongside a thoughtful Merrill and a contemplative Varric through the stone into Lowtown's dust, the distance swallowed him, if not quite whole.

* * *

The room had no windows, but the blankets and pallet smelled fresh, and the door could not be locked or barred. Uncertain as to whether this was a worry or an advantage, Fenris let the bed lure him deep.

He woke once, throat raw. But if anyone heard him scream, there was no sign from the nearest neighbours, no wine casks hurled in protest.

Morning assaulted him with the sound of children.

It annoyed him.

Forearm across his eyes, he felt his brow twist into a snarl.

This was not right. Until he had felt the fine motion of the wrinkles of his face against his arm, the world only touched him through fog, emotions lacking immediacy, reactions taken without consequence. His irritation increased the deeper his snarl grew, until his hands curled to fists and he bared his teeth and wondered what begot what: the rage his expression, or his expression the rage.

He could kill even a child like this, he thought.

The laughter and shouting was so loud, echoing off every flimsy wall, deafening. How many of them could there possibly be? Even in Minrathous he never heard such a lot of ill mannered, wretched brats begging to be permanently silenced--

His whole body jerked. He sat up gasping.

Enough fear bridged the distance between his rage and his bemusement, that he could stand. Yet this was only one step closer to flinging open that inadequate door and murdering the noisy, inconsiderate shits with his hands.

Fenris looked at his hands.

The nails were neatly clipped from his convalescence, but dirty. The knots of bone were stark and pale against his colour.

He was not safe, Fenris remembered.

He remembered. Not killing the templars, his tormentors. Though he knew he must have. He remembered killing, children, the defenceless. He was a killer. He had never been safe.

Then Fenris caught sight of the leathers in this shack of a room, the sheath beside them. Someone had left him armour and a short sword, both worn but whole. Too fine for an alienage. In the act of unsheathing sword from weary scabbard, fluid motion lifted aching limbs like a dance and the blade sang something pure and forgotten.

Fenris caught sight of his reflection in the metal. He buried both blade and leathers under his mattress with frantic haste.

He retreated until he found a wall, smacked his head firmly against the flaking panel and stayed there.

Gradually, the infinite darkness retreated from the corners. His detachment filled the space. The room was just a room, bare enough for spite, only a mattress, no windows, and a door which would not lock.

Fenris approached the door.

Seven children of varying ages played rugger with a lopsided ball of rags. The Marcher style, hands more than feet, bodies more than skill. A drunk cheered them from atop a barrel in use as goal. Buildings loomed around the square, permanent and shanty both.

Unmistakably, they hemmed him in.

Fenris timed it to when a short, unexpectedly dedicated little girl grabbed the ball and pumped her legs for the opposite side of the square. Slinking past, he attracted only the petition of the drunk.

'I am not your brother,' Fenris replied. 'Nor would I spare a coin on you even if you were.'

'Cousin, then,' the drunk persisted. 'You're new here. I didn't ask for a spare coin, we none of us have spares. I asked for coin, honest as. We all help each other out here, see? Those more fortunate to those of us less fortunate.'

'You are not my cousin,' Fenris said.

Yesterday, the day before. He did not fit within time any more, or the days moving through him like water through a broken vessel. He drew a rusty sword on three drunken raiders, lyrium alight to act as muscle where muscle failed. Two raiders fled at the sight, the third's charge ending more on his own sword than Fenris'.

Fenris looked at the drunk elf, whose hair was greying and whose teeth were terrible. For an instant, he saw his hands around the wrinkled throat, felt the crack when bone gave against the greater strength, and he did not laugh.

The drunk raised his palms, offended. 'Easy, cousin.'

Fenris closed his eyes. Maybe he was possessed. Perhaps in his extremity he had surrendered.

Convenient, Anders said. The only wonder is that you took this long to find a way to blame everything you do on someone else. Again.

But that was not the voice of the Anders whose subdued nightmares kept Fenris sane.

'I am sorry.'

'Aren't we all,' the drunken elf said, frowning ferociously.

Then he turned his back.

Fenris looked at the hunched spine and remembered:

'What did you do, little brother? Who did you tell about me? You have always wished evil on me! Do you want those monsters to sew my eyes and my mouth--'

'If it stops your whining, yes.'

Varania's spike of ice struck him clear to the heart.

'You have no name,' his father said. 'No place at this table. Until you accept your family as they are, your family will not accept you.'

Dinner set, the tutor called, his brothers measured for new tunics and his sister for a smock, they did not speak to him. Joining the harvest, grapes red as blood in the sunlight, no other elf in the household gave him more acknowledgement than duty demanded. Bathing was the loneliest time, steam always bouncing full of the same familial banter, the warmth smothering. Ajax was always first out, eldest and soon to be wed. Aletus braided Varania's hair with his weaver's fingers, the pampered only girl given a red-gold crown, as pale and ruddy in their midst as their father and favoured by the magister. Danae and Rhadamon battled over a deliberately misplaced pat of soap, splashes from the fight landing on hot stone, steaming and cracking. Not a glance in his direction.

He could not stay or he would stifle.

'Stringbean, listen. Apologise to Nia, stop wasting your free days hanging about those revolutionaries, and we can get on with life again.'

As they dressed, Ajax spoke softly enough their father would not hear as he bathed alone. Despite eleven years of seniority, Ajax still had to rise to his toes to meet his youngest brother's eyes.

'She nearly killed me, elder brother. If our magister had been any other--'

'Rhad nearly killed you when he pushed you down the steps last year, did you forget? How many lashes have I taken for you and Ales for your brawls? This is what family is for. Practicing how not to die.'

Ajax smiled, slight and small, and bittersweet. Fenris wanted to kiss him.

This is my brother.

'She has no self control.'

'She's as much a child as you. Should we sew your mouth up for your bloody tongue? This is the time when you and she are supposed to learn your control. Even the magister was only concerned Nia had tried to hide her quickening.'

'She's a mage. She will never have self control. It will never benefit her to learn and so we have to make her.'

Ajax's eyes hardened, grey as the steel his youngest brother coveted. 'Stop listening to the fucking Qunari, stringbean. Their way only leads to death for those of our kind. They preach blasphemy.'

'Because they are the only ones who still speak the truth in Seheron, and call us the slaves we are?'

Their mother called, 'Ajax!'

Ajax complied with the shunning, leaving mother and youngest child to look at each other for the first time since he was declared outcast.

Her lips softened, if not her eyes, forming the shape of a name she did not articulate.

Say it, Fenris thought. Please, mother. Please say it.

But she was turning her back.

'Fenris.'

Merrill's hand was small on his forearm, her eyes concerned.

'Are you all right?'

The brats, the elvish brats and their stupid big, loud mouths, screamed with laughter as the girl with the ball of rags came up from a muddy puddle, filthy and crying.

Fenris said, 'I just woke. I need to piss.'

'Oh. Oh, of course. Come with me,' Merrill flushed then firmed, nodding once, 'we should have thought to explain the necessities last night. There used to be outbreaks of disease regularly, but the harhen put in place some ideas which worked quite well to keep the flux away since--'

'I would appreciate haste,' Fenris said, stiffly.

'Goodness, of course. Right this way. Good morning, children!'

'Aneth ara,' came the chorus, even from the snivelling girl.

'Ma serannas suledin in an!'

'Thank you for remembering,' Fenris translated.

Merrill gave him a surprised look, then smiled. 'I do what I can. I was to be a Keeper, once, but here I share instead.'

'I think I was always a killer.'

'I'm sure even you weren't born with a sword in your hand.'

'Only the will for it,' Fenris said.

'Well, use that willpower to hold on a bit longer. It's a fair walk.'

Because Merrill led him to a jetty.

If he could call it that. Perhaps a deck, built without sanction along the escarpment ringing the alienage's rear escape. Rocks below pockmarked an ocean of blue deep enough to be black. At one end, adults bathed while mostly clad, naked children wet and slippery in the wan morning light. At the other end, a curl of cliff deflected the updraft. Two boys crossed their streams and contributed their drop to the ocean. A grandmother and four men squatted on five low wooden thrones, backs to the horizon, feeding the fishes. Some attempt had been made to screen the area, but the vertical structure was thwarted by salt and wind.

Merrill averted her eyes politely, but Fenris could not.

'There's only one well for drinking water. Dug in a long ago riot, when the Tevinters tried to gate the community. It's not a very deep well -- everyone used to go in the street or empty their pots there, or they dug their own trench, but the water was being contaminated. There are so many of us in here. Some of the original buildings have proper toilets, with a drop -- it's not Tevinter plumbing, but my house has one, the harhen's house, and the place for the elderly. You could always--'

Fenris suppressed the panic. His detachment was strong, if imperfect.

'Do you intend to hold my hand?'

Merrill smiled helplessly. 'I can wait over there, to show you to your bath after. Anders mentioned you would need a good hot soak.'

He had held Bodhan's hand, crushing the square palm as if passing on the pain would make his less. Pissing fire in fits and dribbles and starts, even without his guts hurting and incompetent for the other. If it hurt when it happened in his sleep, he never felt it.

Unfair, that his choices were always between pain or humiliation.

Unconcerned, the grandmother levered herself up with only a passing hand from a fellow, then collected her walking stick from where it leaned against the rail.

Fenris approached the edge steadily, and it was every bit as bad as he thought.

But then it was over. All things eventually were over. He wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his wrist, and no one had looked at him more than twice.

He followed Merrill back to his room, slower now the urgency was relieved. The children were gone, but there was a chipped ceramic bowl on his doorstep still showing the fingermarks of its creator, with a well-fitted cover, held on by a faded ribbon tied in a bow. Steam curled through a tiny hole in the lid.

'Breakfast now or after?'

'Who left that there?'

'Your neighbours. Where the nearest bath is.'

Fenris looked at the building against which whose south wall his shack was built. A long house, two storey and old, with one carved door. A child with huge ears jumped to peek from an upper window, waved at nothing, and dropped again.

'Who left me the blade and the armour?'

'Varric.' Merrill hesitated. 'The harhen insisted you have the means to do your duty if it came to that. Carver sourced the blade. He said it was the best he could find at short notice that you would be able to wield.'

Easier to snarl at thought of templar. 'I would wield his own blade against him.'

'I'd like to see that,' Merrill said, as if oblivious to the anger. 'Carver has a very big sword. Bigger than your old sword. But I hope there won't be blood.'

Fenris subsided. Every time he engaged, his detachment was threatened, and the emotion lurking beneath terrified him.

The bath proved to be in a dedicated room within the long house, off the side of a dim creaking corridor. The sounds of life groaned through the floorboards above. Merrill heated the water, as subtly as she could for using her magic. Beyond complaint, Fenris stripped Hawke's shirt and went to the bath in his trousers, filthy as they were.

Merrill closed the door when she left.

One leg cocked over the edge of the bath, Fenris stared at the unmoving latch. His heart thundered in panic. Tried to flee his chest.

After moments, the pain of the unbalanced posture forced him to fall. The water's heat struck him belatedly, cold shoulders, cold joints, freezing feet, afire.

He closed his hands tight around the rim, ready to flee.

Surprising himself, he let go.

The water roared, pressing his eyelids closed. The tips of his ears felt impossibly hot. Weightless in the heat, the ache eased.

He could hear his heartbeat slowing.

He opened his eyes.

A different nothingness: a blanket, not darkness, not solitude, if still flecked with his floating filth. The floorboards creaked overhead, muffled. He smelled nothing, felt nothing, except the overwhelming heat.

He surfaced reluctantly, to breathe.

Then, gasping, the unnatural emotion surged again, same as the terrifying lack of control on his awakening. In Hawke's mansion, for all his days there, there had only ever been hints of this daunting depth, with Anders leaking compassion and Bodahn to rage at safely.

Here, nothing but himself to surface. The knife's edge, irrationality on either side.

But the loneliness, self-taught, was hammer and shield.

There would be a time when it would not be so hard. So he supposed.

He removed his trousers and applied soft soap to skin as well as fabric, scrubbing harder than he wanted, and if he did not look at himself, everything between his legs still felt wrong. The occasional shudders were involuntary, water dripping from his cheeks. He hunched in the water after, opaque with soap and with sand grating where he sat, letting the heat ease the knot inside. But he had to rise eventually.

A small mirror on the wall caught the sunlight, sheet metal warped and corroded, winking.

Wrapped in a thin bathsheet, Fenris approached.

Wet, his hair was thick enough to lie flat across the lyrium. The few stray dark hairs exposed by the shortness, stubborn remnants, pepper staining the salt. His lashes were still odd, like bristles on a brush.  
The bones were as he remembered them, stark and troubling.

His trousers already soaked, Fenris used the cooling water and melting soap to scrub Hawke's shirt from a dirty white to a uniform grey. He was wringing out the fabric over a hole in the floorboards when Merrill knocked and entered without pause.

Her voice caught, blossoming with horror at the sight of him. 'Oh, Fenris--'

He rebelled against the suspicious shine in her eyes. Am I not alive? 'Get me a shirt. Get me one right now.'

'I-- Right. But I wouldn't know where-- Aleissa will know.'

Fourteen children lined the hall when he left, dressed in another human's large shirt. Scuffling and anything but silent, one girl was even covered in flaking mud.

'About time,' said one.

Who was not a child, Fenris saw, but a very short elf.

Then Fenris knew.

They had housed him in an orphanage.  
'You cannot bathe children in that water.'

Spilled tea and piss and filth and tears and his clammy, sick sweat, the thought of children sharing the same water as his corrupted flesh--

The emotion threatened.

The woman was impassive. 'I don't intend to haul two lots of buckets in one day. That's a big tub.'

'But I'm so dirty,' the muddy girl wailed.

'Can't you wash at the deck, the jetty? With the others?'

The children looked at Fenris, aghast.

Aleissa said, 'And what parent stands there with them, to protect the virtue of so many against those who come? I am alone. I am no Tabris to defend the gates with my whirling blades.'

Fenris opened his mouth and closed it. When the overseer walked through the corral of the house's slaves and indicated one child, every other parent turned away in relief and gratitude, forgetting the terror of tomorrow.

A boy said softly, 'Why is he wearing Alistair's clothes?'

'Because Alistair went home,' the muddy girl cried. 'That was ages ago. Why do you always forget?'

'I miss Alistair.' The boy eyed Fenris balefully. 'Alistair used to fill the tub.'

'Not when he had a headache,' said the smallest, around her thumb.

'That was always.'

'Alistair had a duck,' the boy said stubbornly.

'Do you have a headache, messere?'

Fenris looked at Merrill, who had her hands pressed over her mouth, then at Aleissa, as blank as canvas waiting for a brush to curve a smile.

'If you intend to fill the tub before lunch, serah elf, I suggest you start now. It's a long walk from the pump.'

Fenris nodded shortly.

Aleissa bowed to Merrill. 'Ma serannas, to you and the hahren.'

For what, Fenris would have asked.

But that, too, he knew. Sold by his own people.

'Lath araval ena,' Merrill said. 'Be well, Fenris. I will see you tomorrow morning.'

The breakfast waiting on his porch was inoffensive and lukewarm. Fenris ate with his hands, ignoring the tug of his ulcerated throat, stopping only when his stomach cramped. He sipped water from the glass bottle, which tasted of dirt. He pulled the leathers out from under the mattress, and the slender sword.  
Wanting and not wanting. He could kill without these, so fear of them was irrational. But the garb sent a message of his willingness to fight, clear as a magister's studded staff.

The trews were worn to suede. The vest fit snug over the unknown Alistair's shirt, crosslaced at sides, with a high, stiff collar to protect the throat. Bracers, no greaves. Fenris settled the sword across his back.  
He left the collar loose, open.

'That's some fine gear you have there,' said the drunk, as he passed, 'cousin. Cost much?'

In the square outside the orphanage, Aleissa gave him two buckets and the muddy girl for a guide. 'No one touches a hair on her head, especially no shem. Sonni, you stay in Fen's sight.'

The diminutive stung like a lash.

'Alistair used to carry four buckets,' the loyalist told him.

By the fourth trip, the task superseded Fenris' resentment at being used. This was a battle he had won before.

He fought for balance, walking stairs carrying water. He fought not to use his lyrium, where every thundering heartbeat increased the temptation. The oldest of tricks, willpower forcing the foreign substance to take the weight instead of muscle, an external skeleton of steel.

He was stubborn. He had won every battle before, or he would not be alive to fight this one, now. One foot, then the next. The set of his elbows, his shoulders, even the position of his ribs, filling his thoughts in an effort to distribute the weight and the pain equally.

When it was at last done, the final bucket poured clean and clear into the waiting tub, Aleissa sorted the children into an order of least dirty to most.

'It's not fair,' Sonni shouted. 'I don't want to be last! I helped!'

'Get used to it,' Fenris said.

She poked out her tongue and pulled her ears.

An inexplicable lunch waited for him on his doorstep, in a similar sealed ceramic container. The half-eaten breakfast was gone, and his bed on the floor remade.

Fenris puzzled at this, ate what he could, then collapsed fully clad. He slept and did not dream.

He had been awake for some time without realising, stiff in his leathers, thoughtlessly following the aging light across the wall, when a scrape of ceramic had him on his feet before thought. He threw open the door.

'Messere! Oh no!'

The beribboned bowl smashed where it fell. Fenris clung to the door with its protesting single hinge, waiting for the vertigo to clear.

'Orana,' he said, weakly.

The girl tried to salvage his steaming supper, rice disturbingly white on the dirt, all over her smock. She looked up hopelessly.

'I will fetch you another. Aleissa will be so mad, I broke another plate--'

'It was my fault,' Fenris called, 'Orana, it was my fault!.'

She was too fast. When she returned, she was quieter, alerting him only with a knock on the wall and fleeing before he could rise.

Fenris sat outside, in the dirt with his back against his unsteady wall and the bowl on his knees, watching the sun set and the harhen's slow procession, lighting all lanterns needing to be lit. The upper branches of the Vhenadahl were visible over the orphanage roof, moving in a breeze he could not feel.

When the rice cooled, he ate a little.

The drunk sidled over.

'Still no coin,' Fenris said. 'Still not your cousin.'

'Let's say I believe that,' the drunk said, and licked his lips, quick as a snake.

Fenris surrendered the bowl. The drunk squatted next to him without thanks, eating so fast Fenris felt ashamed. He sipped his water.

From somewhere, the drunk produced a bottle of thick glass and black basketweave and offered.

'Wine?'

'I call it vinegar,' said the drunk. 'Also my best friend.'

Fenris drank viciously. But if he thought of Alrik's goblet held to his lips, the taste shattered the memory. He coughed miserably, every ulcer in him screaming.

'--your best friend is a character.'

'You should hear his jokes.'

'I knew a man like this,' Fenris shook the wine. 'A fine bottle, but more vinegar than wine.'

'Well, this is more piss than vinegar. What happened to your man?'

Fenris thought of Hawke in Hightown. 'Probably nothing.'

The alienage closed at night, as did most of Kirkwall, because despite the lanterns and city guards, the night belonged to the second half of the city, and if that half lived by violence there were still rules, still an order, of sorts.

Reluctant to move, Fenris watched moths fly around the nearest lantern, the occasional immolation spicing the play. The vinegar passed back and forth between them, a blanket against the night.

'Do you have a safe place to sleep?'

The drunk elf shook his head. 'Slavers walked past me the last three raids. You're looking at the only elf Tevinter slavers rejected.'

'Heh,' Fenris said.

'Can you imagine if a magister used my blood for magic? Shades would have been staggering in circles. Demons dancing the remigold.'

'Ha,' Fenris said.

Then it was suddenly hilarious.

The drunk elf watched, surprised, then joined in for solidarity.

'--Fenris?'

Mopping his eyes on Alistair's shirt, Fenris looked up to find Aveline arching over them, her brow furrowed in concern. She carried a small crate under each arm, lantern light gilding her armour.

'Are you all right?'

'I am more piss than vinegar.'

'I think he's drunk,' Donnic murmured.

Aveline's furrows deepened. 'Should you be drinking?'

'Guard-Captain,' Fenris said severely, 'Should you be looting?'

Aveline scowled, but Donnic hefted his own crate, rueful. 'We're delivering furniture.'

'As you can see, there is an abundance of space within my mansion for even the most thoughtless of gifts.'

'Let's just set it up out here, shall we, love?' Donnic nodded at a likely space. 'We brought cards.'

'Alas, I have no coin. The mage promised to deliver, but he is not here. Perhaps it is a busy night in Darktown?'

Donnic and Aveline exchanged glances, but the drunk elf, who had retreated against Fenris' side in wariness at the approach of humans, startled upright.

'You said you had no coin!'

'I do not,' Fenris said.

'But you will.'

'I am owed.'

'Aren't we all.' Unmollified.

'Will you introduce us to your friend, Fenris?' Aveline said carefully.

'What friend? I have no friends.'

'He's drunk,' Donnic said.

'Yes,' Fenris said. 'Drunken introductions. Guard-Captain Aveline, here, believes I am a dangerous beast who warrants constant supervision. Her husband Donnic, here, is also her subordinate and was assigned ongoing surveillance duty under the pretext of friendship. This is not my cousin. This is his best friend the bottle of vinegar.'

Donnic's hands stilled in the shuffle. 'That was years ago, Fenris. We've spoken of this already.'

Aveline perched on a crate, the wood protesting her plate, and said dryly, 'I'm not sure vinegar is the right word.'

Fenris leaned forward. 'Let us diamondback, then. For dirt in lieu of silver.'

'Wouldn't you know it,' the vagabond elf announced. 'Suddenly I'm rich.'

Morning was unwelcome. Fenris vomited into an empty barrel before he could reach the alienage's likely illegal sewer, but no one saw him and he hastened on. Unable to sleep through his screaming stomach, at least he was early, with few people there to witness him suffering over the edge.

A young woman approached after he managed an unhappy fastening of his trousers. She cradled a bucket of water, a salt-crusted loop of long rope over her shoulder. She was grinning broadly.

'I saw you at the well yesterday. You're helping Aleissa with the children, aren't you?'

Fenris made a noise.

'Aleissa hates men who drink, she lived with this shem before-- Anyway, you could probably use this. Clean up a bit.'

A bucket of ocean water. Fenris stuck his head in it, and the cold shattered every pain and remade it anew, with much sharper edges.

After making sure he wouldn't drown, the woman patted him on the back. 'That's the spirit, cousin.'

Fenris slipped into the orphanage still dripping, and was betrayed by creaking floorboards. Aleissa's bedroom was evidently right by the main entrance, and she slept with a mace.

Eying his wet hair suspiciously, she only said, 'How are you feeling after yesterday's labour?'

Fenris sought the right words.

When it came evident there were none, Aleissa softened. 'All right. I'll help you today, but only this once. Let's hurry before the children wake up.'

Merrill appeared briefly to heat his bathwater. A few more threads of knotted pain untangled, but knowing the children waited he could not linger.

He did not touch breakfast or lunch, Orana fleeing though he called to her. That afternoon Varric woke him with dry humour, the draft of a ridiculous story on which Fenris sharpened his scorn, and a rogue's quick eyes which did not visibly note the untouched bowls.

The following morning, Aleissa stopped Fenris in the hall, stating he would share their meal in person. Fenris ate cross-legged on the floor with fourteen giggling, incoherent children, Aleissa's unnerving calm, and a desperately silent Orana, which was as awkward as he could have hoped.

The bowls returned to his porch after three days of forced company, and he did not let them sit long enough to cool.

Donnic came, or Aveline, or both. Bodahn came once with Varric, teaching him a new game with circular cards. Varric shook Fenris' hand before leaving that night.

'I won't be around for a while, Broody. Carta business. Wish me luck.'

Merrill sat with him at night, telling stories, unsubtly digging for how much elvhen he understood, where he learned. He cursed in Arcanum after she left and struggled to reclaim his detachment.

Occasionally, there was an excess of wine.

He feared the resurgent memory, uncertain of the trigger. He could not tell what was real when they came. The heat of a Tevine summer, blood on his hands, too terrified to act lest his actions match a different canvas, the battlefield warrior wreaking havoc in the pastoral scene.

Without being asked, he found a place for himself as Orana's silent escort, carrier of rice and fruit. As companion of screaming children, when Orana retreated and Aleissa threw up her hands, little fists bouncing off his leather while he kept his lips tight against offering unwanted solutions. When drunk Hightowners decided to play tourist, daring each other to worse, Fenris leaned by the orphanage door with a posture of perfectly insulting boredom, staring direct challenge. If the Hightown dolls had been fool enough to bring him a fight, Fenris would have felt no guilt in letting his lyrium bear the strain.

'The slavers have been quiet,' Aleissa admitted, over another awkward dinner. 'Only fool shems these days. An actual magister was poking around a while back.'

'The magister died.'

'Did you have anything to do with that?'

'I did not kill him.'

'That's not what I asked.'

'He died because of me,' Fenris told the skull grinning behind his eyes.

The children knew him, but only Sonni disliked him. Ball of rags tucked against her hip, she took enough offence one day to quit her game, thundering across the square to his doorstep where he sat. Then she stared.

'Yes?'

'That's what you do. Like you're some shem pervert. You can talk to us, you know.'

The little girl voice was all Kirkwall, no Dalish lilt, and had the promise of swords somewhere under the childish tongue.

'What should I say?'

'Aneth ara, for beginnings. The First says, start with little things.'

Fenris growled, 'Aneth ara, little thing.'

Except Sonni went bright red, dropped her precious ball and sprinted away.

'You've never really been around children,' Aleissa noted, when he brought over the ball.

'I was the youngest,' Fenris said, and stopped, except his tongue did not want to stop, 'of six, five males and one female. There were no other children in the estate.'

'Is that a big family for Tevinter elves? Couldn't do it in an alienage. The children would starve.'

Questions were keys to a door he did not want unlocked.

'--married the Carecos sport to a cousin from the same bloodline and gave them ten years. Only one in six bred true.'

'Pity. And you won't just stud him out?'

'Couldn't bring myself to do it. I'm a Chantry conservative.'

A titter of laughter, a context, a bowl of sugared almonds held high over his head as he knelt on cold marble, straining not to twitch as the hours of idle chatter passed by, his eyes closed lest the other old lady notice they were green and want to take him home.

Blindly, Fenris begged for an end to the recollection.

As if his plea was understood, Aleissa said stiffly, 'Thank you for bringing back Sonni's ball.'

Carecos. It was his name, but not his name. His family name.

In his nest of a bed, there was always time to avoid thinking. Except his body betrayed him eventually, healing until he was incapable of safely sleeping the day away.

Form and order could be imposed by force, Fenris decided.

Tevinter warriors enforced all the hierarchy that the fluid magister oligarchy did not. Fenris had been taught by the best, the bodyguard of an Archon deposed by suicide. The human slave had been castrated on his master's death for his failure, left to die of shame. Danarius bought him regardless, and for a year the human lived only for Fenris.

The magister's reward for a job well done, at the end of that year tutor and youth opposed each other in Danarius' central court, ringed on three sides by vertical glyphs of force forming walls of clear water and ten thousand goldfish, swimming in a world sustained by a constant flow of blood.

The hardest battle of Fenris' life, and the easiest death to deliver.

Because he had hated the man for his every cruelty, every beating for sloppy stance, the mockery the human delivered for his elven softness, the constant abuse. The humiliations he forced Fenris to perform for every failure in stance, until Fenris' anger overruled everything else, his world as thin and focused as the edge of his sword.

A perspective which had not opened until a ship sailed away from Seheron, leaving him behind.

But in that dead human's instruction, each twist of wrist and shift of weight built on the previous, every move of sword and form akin to a scribe's isolated strokes building to an understanding, and Fenris had not hated him when he killed him.

The square where the children played rugger was not a thoroughfare. Fenris trained there, clumsy and cursing, avoiding the laughter of children and the solitary drunk by simply rising before dawn. When he decided he needed a better yardstick for his repair, he found Alistair's littlest loyalist in his customary morning hiding place, poking at snails beneath the nearest stair, avoiding the gruel Orana served for breakfast.

'Your human with the duck. When he filled your bath, how did he carry four buckets at once? Did he use a yoke?'

The boy looked at him as if he were crazy. 'He had a stick.'

'Show me.'

'"Please",' the boy said stubbornly.

Fenris looked at the child.

'I won't unless you say it.'

They were another species. 'Please.'

Grinning, the boy led him to a tiny fenced courtyard, holding a dry, shattered pump, signs of futile repair, a dead tree, and a long, thick rod of cast iron, bent on a curve not as severe as a bow.

'This is it?' Fenris hefted the rod.

The boy nodded, then followed him to the well.

The water first, testing the weight to see each bucket was even. Fenris threaded the rod through the handle holes, not the loop of wire, two buckets a side, after finding the holes had been sanded to fit the shaft smoothly.

The boy eyed him with evident doubt.

Fenris crouched, hunching forward to settle the rod across the broad part of his shoulders.

The door slammed shut.

The door slammed shut.

Pressure.

Wrists and shoulders.

Bound.

The walls were there the walls were there. Always there. He could not see them for the darkness, but he knew. Felt. These last months, wretched dreaming. The unused bunk in the corner taunting him and the chair on its side, the terrible, terrifying funnel and the crate of waiting flasks, the head the head which chattered in the voice of a demon, the rotting smell, decaying flesh and his own liquefied interior spattering constant on stone. What was he doing? Counting his teeth. Over and over. Sluglike tongue moving over chipped eyetooth and crooked lowers in the dark, number and feel filling the inside of his mind until there was room for nothing else, seven, eight. Nineteen, twenty. After twenty five, twenty six. The triumph warmed.

Horrified.

If he opened his eyes, he would see the alienage square, the well, the Vhenadahl. If he opened his eyes, he would be capable of looking down, of seeing his knees and feet, and dirt. The fear was insurmountable, that he would not, that the walls would be there. The Wall, barring him from his own body.

If he opened his eyes.

When I open my eyes, Fenris shouted.

On the count. Twenty six, twenty five. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen. Seven, six, five, four. Three, two. Now.  
Now.

Do it now. Worthless coward. Or he would have to let his head drop and the collar crimp; he would die choking on his own foul breath.

Fenris opened his eyes, squatting frozen in the dawn lit square, his breath steaming in the increasingly chill mornings. There was a yoke across his shoulders and full buckets catching dawn in his periphery.

The boy sucked snail off one dirty finger, contemplative, then stuck his finger in his own ear. 'I knew you couldn't do it. It's too heavy for an elf. Only Alistair could lift four.'

Fenris stood slowly. His knees cracked. A moment of stillness, feeling the sway of full buckets and anticipating their motion. He allowed nothing else into his mind. Stillness. Physicality and calculation. Preparation for motion.

If he could feel the clammy sweat coursing down his spine, it was no more than the weight should cause.

'Now what do you have to say?'

The boy said, stubbornly, 'Alistair could lift six.'

'When I finish this task, I am going to smack you.'

The boy was unimpressed.

'And then make you eat your porridge cold.'

The boy yelped, grinning, and scarpered.

Some days after Fenris had worked himself up to lifting and carrying six buckets, steady even on the stairs, he woke to a full erection.

His dozing mind shrivelled in horror from the sensation, and correspondingly the heat rushed from his groin. Blood retreated, and his prick too, sheathing harmlessly, the tension easing from his belly and thighs.

He did not want it there to begin with.

Wet stuck his nightshirt to his belly and his blankets. Too detached to even be disgusted, Fenris examined the quantity, uncomprehending. He had come, leaked like piss, and could not even recall the dream.

He did not think he trained any harder that morning than any other, but by the time he went into the orphanage, his legs were shaking uncontrollably, hair slicked to his forehead, the imminent winter freezing his sweaty second shirt to his back.

He knocked on Aleissa's door. She answered with her friend the mace. She yawned.

'I will no longer need the bath. I can wash with the others.'

Aleissa snapped her mouth closed, studying his face in detail, puzzled. She let the mace drop and tugged at her braid.

'All right. Even if I think you're mad. It'll be snowing in a few weeks, everyone without a bath ends up just not bathing in winter.'

'Thank you. For the use. While I needed it.'

'Will you still help with filling? Seems it's a part of your routine now--'

'Of course. I owe you for the food and the shelter.'

Her shoulders softened. 'You do. Thank you.' He was at the front door when she said, 'Fen. When are you leaving?'

'I am not.'

'Oh. All right.'

Deliberately, Fenris looked at her breasts when she turned, light sculpting the shape and weight clear through her nightshirt. But the form was abstract and his mind still recoiled.

He took a coil of rope to the deck, a bucket, and a pat of soap. Only a diligent few were there, and he joined them in shivering obscenely. After, he filled the children's tub while letting his wet clothes freeze for true. He went to his room and rubbed himself raw with the bathsheet, friction warming away the chill. Then he ate, quickly, and returned to the orphanage.

If Merrill seemed surprised to find him ducking into the bathing room fully dressed, she only said good morning as usual, pushing heat into the water until it steamed.

'Varric has been gone a while,' Fenris tried.

'I hope he's all right,' Merrill said. 'I thought he'd learned his lesson about going off with Hawke into the Deep Roads. Maybe it's a dwarven thing, even for a surface dwarf. You have to know your heritage to deny it.'

'Varric is with Hawke in the Deep Roads.'

'And Carver,' Merrill said, somewhat wistfully.

Fenris opened his mouth, but the door was open and Aleissa ushered in the first lot of children. Fenris lingered, trying to catch Merrill's eye, but the three children were three new faces, pale and grimy, recoiling in fear at the sight of him. Their hands twined around each other and Aleissa's tunic, hard.

Aleissa gave him a warning look.

'Anath ara, children,' Merrill said brightly, seeming set to stay. 'Do you know what that means?'

Fenris retreated.

In the hall, Sonni glared at him blatantly.

'What have I done now?'

'There's three new ones today,' she said.

'I saw.'

'Why do you never ask our names?'

'I-- don't know.'

Sonni said, 'In all the time you've been here, you never asked anyone's name, even when they were new. Now there's three whole new ones, and we're twenty one in here and that's too many, that's more than the shems in the Keep let us have. Aleissa's going to send me away. Are you sad?'

Fenris crouched beside her, because he knew how to deal with tantrums, the stoic force for little fists. But Sonni just scrubbed her cheeks, tears falling without sobs.

'Aleissa would not send you away.'

'Liar,' Sonni told his feet. 'Orana told me. She said Aleissa found a place for me in Hightown. A human who needs a servant, but only wants a little one.'

'That's...better than the street,' Fenris said.

'Liar,' Sonni grated.

Yes, Fenris thought. Most likely. 'How old are you? You seem too young--'

As if by rote, Sonni said, 'I have nine years, master. My name is Leasondri, master. Thank you, master.'

Then she dipped in an uncertain curtsey.

The waiting children yelped and scattered when Fenris put his fist through the wall. Sonni stared at him, eyes wide.

Fenris disentangled from the shattered panelling, too angry to be embarrassed. His knuckles were bleeding, his shoulder wearing the shock. He nearly pulled the panel from the wall when Aleissa and Merrill opened the door, fragments caught in Alistair's shirtsleeve.

'Fenris! Wh--'

He uncoiled. 'Why are you selling her?'

Aleissa's impassive face formed an impressive frown, directed at Sonni. 'Stop manipulating him.'

'I don't want to be a slave,' Sonni wailed.

'How can you do this? How can you give them sanctuary then sell them as soon as you've aged them sufficient to be useful? You betray us.'

'I remember a time when you didn't give a shit about "us", Fenris. Now I'm betraying you? What do you know about our lives, except that you can come and go however you want, because of your friends, and your bloody sword? Her own mother dumped her here because she had too many mouths to feed, and you blame me for finding her a job?'

'I--'

Aleissa hissed in anger. 'No. This is not about you. This is about Sonni. Selbrech is an established Hightown house with interests in lacemaking. They can take her in and raise her to the trade, which is more than I can do. It's not the foundries, it's not the mines.'

'I-- They will pay her.'

'Not during her apprenticeship, but she will have food and board, one day in ten to herself, and a trade at the end of it where she can ask her price. What would you give her? Coin? A bottle?'

'I-- have nothing.'

'Exactly,' Aleissa sneered.  
Then she deflated, scarcely bigger than the children, face settling into lines of pain before the flawless mask returned.

Fenris felt the anger leech away, his shoulders caving.

'I am sorry,' Fenris said. 'I misunderstood.'

'What do I care about your apologies. Even I know it's a poor compromise.' Monotone, as little expression as a porcelain curve.

'I have to go,' Fenris said. 'You were right, when you asked this morning-- I should go.'

Even Merrill looked startled.

'I apologise...about your wall,' Fenris added.

He had little enough in the shack to take. He settled the slender sword across his back. Took one of the faded ribbons Orana used to bind the covers onto his meals. Wrapped this around his wrist for no reason he could determine except once picked up, he could not put it down, fingering the tattered ends. Drank the last of the water in its container by the door, because it was fresh.

The square was empty, lanterns from the night before still smouldering against the dawn. The Vhenadahl stretched over the orphanage roof. Inside, a screaming fight was taking place seemingly between Aleissa and Sonni, doors slamming and feet thundering, the child's wailing cry thick and strong. It came at him from years of distance.

His family had always fought over him.

Ten years the magister gave your mother and I to build our family and you had to come on the last month now you blaspheme against the magister and the Chantry both with your flirtations with the Qun you are no son of mine

Fenris folded himself on the front step, because it was cold and standing was too much. He pushed his palms against his eyes.

But that was said in anger. No one was angry all the time. Even Fenris knew that.

There boy there you have such a knack with the brush Nia darling look at your brother's letters his have the perfect form you should be more like him he is so careful with his ink

It was more than his family who had fought. There had been a war.

Father with due respect father as your eldest son I very respectfully state that we have unanimously decided we will not share any meal with you until you accept our baby brother back you're being ridiculous old man just hug him even Nia's forgiven him for what he said (forgiven him for being a brat, she said!) so here we stand all our backs to you until you let our little brother be our little brother again

Fenris clearly remembered a war. The noise. The red masts approaching across the sea.

What did I do wrong stringbean no do not hide I want to believe you I want to hear you what did I do wrong that you would say such a cruel thing to your sister come we will go to the Chantry together magic is her chance to be whole and part of Tevinter the magister is so proud of her let us pray together and you do not have to say a word to me in grief or rage or apology it is the Maker you must make your compacts with oh my boy my boy my blood if I could protect you forever I would but your tongue and your conviction will kill you one day but oh I can respect that stubborn little will, boy, you will be a wonder when you are grown

Fenris could hear the swords in Sonni's voice, shrieking across the distance. Smoke in the sky. Seheron burning. Shades gliding fleet through the vineyard avenues towards the onslaught of the Qun, leaving dead bushes in their wake and the air thick with char and wine. The trees, they were not trees, they were the hundred thousand masts of Qunari ships.

My baby my baby why do you have to be so tall can you help me get Ales' box of ribbons from the top shelf why he insists on putting them there ah thank you Leto you are perfect.

One too many times cracking his skull against the low doorframe of the house when going to dinner, joints already aching day and night from the growth spurts, another humiliation in clothes that never fit even with Ales constantly letting down the hems and the always nagging aches and pains. The family giggling. His mother pulling him down with plump hands to his cheeks and kissing the sore spot.

Leto Leto you are perfect it's the door that's wrong.

Ajax carried Varania, her braids coming loose and the betraying magic swooping and weaving as a pale wisp of light around them. The twins pushed Mother to run between them, begging and cursing and pushing and pulling, Mother who was overweight and dark with her magnificent cloud of hair which had not felt an outside breeze in decades.

Only Aletus and their father were motionless on the stair.

Leto turned back.

'Father--'

'Go. I saw you come this far because you are, you are my blood, and I am glad you will survive. But I cannot come with you.'

'Ales? Aletus, please. We can take him between us and run. We can carry him if we have to, I am strong enough.'

But the gentlest of them shook his head, smiled. 'I cannot leave him to face this alone.' His arm over the elder's hunched shoulders, fit and firm and dark.

A brief paroxysm of tears. Leto panicked.

'You were right,' their father said weakly, with his washed out eyes and milky skin, and sandy hair with its last trace of blush, and the black stains on his parchment hands, as if the years of books had turned skin to paper and blood to ink.

He was old, older than the magister who owned him. He raised her, taught her letters, how to run an estate. He turned the rocky borderland soil of the magister's exile into a productive paradise. The magister raised him to the highest position a slave could have, and they lived a lifestyle only possible in Seheron.

When the Qunari forces landed, they were taken from their home by the household guard to be with the other slaves, ready for their use in battle. The true wealth of Tevinter lay prostrate in the magister's grand hall, one hundred and forty six slaves arrayed in order of worth.

Least worth to the front of the square, where the magister stood ready. Leto's father and his family, last of all. The magister killed her way through the cheaper bodies first, using their blood to raise ranks of shades and magic and darkest form to batter the Qunari. That Leto's father would have been killed last had not mattered at all. The magister would not hesitate.

Leto waited to die with a hundred and forty six, forty five, forty four, forty one, thirty seven oh Maker Maker Maker thirty twenty nine twenty two only one hundred and ten other slaves, and gagged on his fear. The guards ringing the court killed slaves who panicked and bolted. Blood curled upwards from the bodies and added to the red cocoon around the chanting magister.

The Qunari army rose through the street, forms like precious metal in the perfect sun. The shades cast no shadows.

Then the dead slave bodies, too, began to lift and speak, moulding to the magister's form, all of them roaring with the magister's voice.

Leto felt Varania's scream where she knelt next to him. He was too late to grab her when she broke, but he lunged, caught her and pressed her face against his chest so she would not see the sword.

But the guard stopped. Blood congealed on his blade from the unclean air.

Leto crashed to his knees and begged.

'Please, please. Please, Maker spare us, Maker spare us, spare us.'

The guard sweated profusely, blunt human face grey and horrified. His hands shook. His armour beaded with blood he had not spilled.

'Take this, for what good it will do you poor fools against the Qun. Get out of here.'

And Leto acquired a dagger made for killing, which was breaking Tevinter law.

The guard roared, 'Stand down, men! Get out of here, all of you! Get out of here. Get up and run--'

The instant scattering, screaming chaos. The slaves rose and fled. The floor slippery with blood and ash, the maelstrom of gore in the air bursting against their faces when they ran, skidding and sliding, breathing their dead. The magister's multiplicitous howl, unnatural and deep, her form no longer human, all arms and arms and arms and faces, reaching out for them, reaping them like grain and adding to her mass--

In the midst, some slaves still knelt, faces to the floor, calm and waiting to die.

'Father,' Leto said, trembling, 'you will not go back in there.'

Aletus helped the old man climb the stair back to the great hall. 'Get going, stringbean. But stay away from the Qunari.'

'Where else can we go? The Qun-- there is nowhere to run--'

'You know what they will do to Nia,' Aletus said. 'Please keep her from them. She deserves to be free too.'

'I wish I was wrong,' Leto said. 'If being wrong means you will come, I am wrong, wrong, wrong, to my bone I am wrong. If you die I do not want to be right.'

'Wanting changes nothing,' the old man said. 'You are right. Be well, Leto. Keep faith with the Maker.'

'The Maker never cared.'

The old man smiled crookedly and said, 'Blasphemous little shit. I love you too.'

Aletus dared to laugh, and if it was hysterical it yet shimmered through the blood. 'Goodbye, little brother. In another life.'

Then Leto ran to catch the others, and Ajax led them to caves and they scrambled helplessly to avoid Qunari and Tevinter armies both, while Rhadamon and Danae pillaged vegetables from ravaged fields and Varania cupped small smokeless fires in her palms so their mother could cook, and Leto cried, because he was the youngest and the tallest and a child, and in the end it only took four weeks before the slavers caught them again, and put them on the block in Minrathous.

Alistair's littlest loyalist unearthed himself from beneath the stair and sat next to Fenris, breath fogging the air.

After a moment, he stroked Fenris' leg until the shaking stopped.

Fenris lowered his hands.

The leather trews were wearing thin. An opening gaped just below the bend on the right knee. The boy stuck his finger in it and traced a lyrium curl, fascinated.

Hoarse. 'What is your name?'

'Tabris.'

'Really? Your given name, not your clan name?'

A solemn nod.

'Your pants are broken,' Tabris said.

'And do you want to be a hero?'

'Ner. Want to be a magister. Or a gardener. I like crushing snails. I made a potion with snails.'

Fenris coughed.

'Alistair was a king,' added the boy. 'He always had a headache.'

'Alistair was a drunk.'

'Drunks can be kings.'

'Not very good ones.'

'You don't know anything,' the boy declared, then sat there radiating hurt.

Nowhere to run, Fenris realised. Not with the orphanage as the scene of pitched battle. Crockery shattered and Sonni screamed her refusal to go.

Fenris told the boy, 'You are right. I know nothing.'

'Alistair never came back. He promised I could go to Ferelden with him. I hate Alistair.'

'Hate can be useful,' Fenris acknowledged.

'I hate you,' the boy said. 'Hello, Orana.'

Fenris stood with haste. Orana flinched, hugging herself.

'I...heard what you said to Aleissa.'

'I hurt her,' Fenris said curtly. 'I did not mean to.'

'I was hoping. For your help.'

Fenris saw her throat bob, the fearful swallow. One foot twined behind the opposite leg.

'You have run from me the entire time I have been here.'

Orana looked anywhere but at him, then when she found courage her eyes were begging, pleading.  
She glanced at little Tabris. In Arcanum, she said, 'I remember when your magister would visit my mistress. After you were dismissed, you always went straight to the women in the slave quarters no matter the hour. Aleissa said I was allowed to say no if someone wanted to have sex with me, but all the girls used to say you were so strong. So I ran.'

'You thought I would rape you.' As he had done before. Oh, not her. But the crimes were interchangeable. If an animal could be said to have committed a crime.

A tiny nod. Her gaze caught on his wrist, on her ribbon, eyes widening.

'I am not worthy,' Orana said, in a small voice. 'I do not imply I am desirable, or that you want me. But you rarely left your bed and only I was near. If you wanted me I would not have been able to say no, so I avoided you.'

His hand hurt too much to punch it through another wall.

Orana said miserably, 'But that Fenris who I knew from Minrathous would not have so spoken to Aleissa. Please, may I...ask? You can refuse. See, Aleissa found me a match. An elf whose wife died, a merchant in Starkhaven. I met him, he is kind, and by marrying him I will be protected. But he does not want me. I remember my mother and father loved each other, but Vilerus only looks for a caretaker for his old age. He would be respectful, Aleissa is careful to choose. But I want--'

Fenris cut her off with a motion of his hand.

Defiant, Orana said, and not in Arcanum, 'I want more.'

'What do you want from me?'

'You are Tevinter. Like me. I have no kin, so the headman acted in proxy and gave his consent. If you claim kinship--'

'We are not cousins.'

'But you might be, at a remove and by marriage. Nine degrees the headman will accept as kinship, and you look Seheron, from the east. There were only six clans from the borderlands and my father's sister married a Seheron elf from the east.'

Fenris had been set to walk. He despised alienages, mires of social obligation. Orana's pinched, nervous features filled his vision.

'What will do you, if you do not wed? You cannot live in an orphanage forever.'

'There's a place for a cook in a tavern. Merrill read the notice to me yesterday.'

'In the Hanged Man.' He disbelieved.

'Yes, that's the name.'

'You want to work in the Hanged Man.'

Orana bit her lip and said, 'I have been free for four years, yet I crave more than this. I will try.'

Fenris said, 'All right.'

The harhen's house was a permanent building, necessitating a walk past the Vhenadahl. Fenris disliked the old tree, not least for its incongruity and most for its symbolism.

Talking to a girl with a basket of kittens outside her house, Merrill stopped when she saw them, the usual worry lifting. 'I told you he would agree.'

Then she joined their fools' procession.

Fenris remembered why he avoided alienages and their mires of obligation. People always assumed they  
knew you.

The harhen's home was no more furnished than Fenris' shack. Not as cold with a small fire smouldering and proper walls. An alcove bathroom, one wall floor to ceiling books.

The harhen listened to Orana's stuttering explanation carefully, then turned to Fenris. 'What are the grounds for your objection?'

Orana quivered at his back.

'I can sufficiently provide for,' his mouth twisted, involuntary, 'my cousin, until a better match can be made.'

The headman stared at Fenris' wrist with Orana's incongruous ribbon, and smiled. 'You are aware the register has already been noted? This could cause upset.'

'But this kinship was not even known when everyone was negotiating,' Merrill said sharply. 'You know that the match with Vilerus would not be likely to result in children. The Blood is so thin these days, it would be foolish to accept a compromise when a happier, stronger match could be made with some time given.'

'Thank you,' the harhen said dryly, 'for the wise and considered opinion of our resident First.'

Merrill inclined her head graciously. 'The decision is yours, of course, harhen. I strive only to preserve heritage and happiness, and when both can be achieved it's a joy for all.'

Musing, the harhen pulled a large book from the shelf. 'I will need your family name to trace the lineage.'

Fenris said, 'Carecos.'

Merrill almost purred. 'Oh, Fenris. I knew you would remember.'

The harhen stopped, book half-drawn. He looked up, his eyes alight, and moved along the shelf sharply, tracing spines with an eager finger, until he found a different one, older.

'Carecos, corrupted form of the Tevinter Incarceros, one of many iterations. "Captured", or perhaps "the Imprisoned", "the Held," the clan name stripped by the Tevinters. That's an old name, an old family. From the days when they still sought to take our names from us, our very identity, when we lost all our kinship. A new identity forged formed the ashes of the old. A new name the People chose for themselves, to make mock of the slavers who could not tell brother from sister from cousin, the People all one clan united in oppression.'

'I am no prodigal,' Fenris said, stiffly. 'I care only for Orana's freedom.'

Orana squeaked.

Smiling, the harhen found his place in the flaking book, untucking a quill from his belt. He licked the nib and glanced about for ink, perched on another shelf. 'Your name?'

His own small, pudgy hand tracing the name in wet sand with a stylus, the old man's approval vast and distant.

'Leto.'

'Your father?'

Ink and parchment, old dusty smells. Bony knees and one arm around his waist. Confusion and disapproval and yearning challenge. 'Ustefen.'

'Your mother?'

The vast, beautiful dark hair. The rich voice, the calloused fingers. The snip of shears by his ear. Using his own wet black curls as brushes against his lips, while she hummed and trimmed. 'Lydia Numonis. The...lineage in Tevinter is patriarchal.'

'Any other progeny,' the harhen dipped his quill again.

'Ajax, Aletus, Rhadamon, Danae, Varania.'

The harhen paused after the second, quill quivering. 'Impressive. It would be easy to find a match for you.'

Merrill clapped her hands to her mouth.

Fenris said, 'I am not interested in being an excuse for community celebration. This is not my community.'

'Interest has little to do with it. All elves, elvhen, have obligations to the People. Our women are used, wooed or abused by the humans. No child fathered by a human bears any elvhen blood. We need pure marriages or we will die.'

'Yet I am incapable.'

The silence shivered. The sticky wet heat of the morning returned abruptly, shame pooled deep in his belly. The eyes were piercing, contemptuous. The old elf knew.

'I had heard you were done a conspicuous ill,' the harhen said eventually. 'A shame.'

Sore knuckles popped and cracked, and Fenris fought to ease his fist.

Outside, the Vhenadahl as witness, Orana raised her hand to him. She let it fall, alighting on the back of his hand.

Because now she was not afraid of him. Because now he was neuter, safe, pseudo-brother, by his own word. He had not lied for her, but her eyes glowed.

'Thank you, Fenris. I never expected him to get so personal. I'm sorry you had to say that--'

But Fenris stepped around her and grabbed Merrill before she could slide away.

'You. You "knew I would remember". You had no doubt when you put Orana to this that I would know my heritage.'

Orana tried, futile, to pry them apart. Merrill gazed up, eyes wide and unafraid, in potent proximity.  
What would she do if he kissed her? If he ripped the bodice along its laces and bared her here?

He felt no desire. Something darker, feared and fearful and slimy, caged in a stinking stone room under a brothel.

'It's a little hard not to see,' Merrill said steadily. 'I've been watching it unravel. A dark little glyph, twisted enough I would have balked to try to undo it myself. It's bound to your blood for power, but the way it works with the lyrium is intricate.'

Fenris said dully, 'Unravelling.'

'Well, yes. Danarius is dead, isn't he? Even the spells woven into someone's life force fall apart without a mage maintaining them, the way a windmill falls apart even if the wind keeps blowing.'

Fenris said, 'The memories will come back.'

'Probably.'

'All of them.'

Merrill hesitated. 'No one remembers everything.'

Fenris said, terrified, 'This is going to keep happening to me. You do not understand. They hurt. When they come, I am no longer here.'

'Most things hurt,' Merrill said. 'Like your hands, right now, on my arms. Squeezing very tightly.'

Fenris said, through his rapid breath, 'I blamed Hawke. When the first memory returned.'

'Ah,' Merrill said. 'Oh, I see. Hawke doesn't know blood magic. No, of everything I'd like to blame on Hawke, I don't think this could apply. You might want to try blaming Danarius for putting the glyph there in the first place. I believe he's in no position to object.'

Orana said in Arcanum, firm as steel, 'Big brother, let the First go.'

Fenris recoiled from Merrill so far he thudded into the wall.

'Sorry,' Orana said immediately, nervously. 'I'm so sorry. I didn't mean--'

'I was leaving before you stopped me. I am leaving now.'

'But where will you go,' Merrill said, curious and always unafraid.

Fenris looked at the sky, and his breath fogging, and thought, it has been three months. Nothing keeps so long.

Fenris said, 'Darktown.'

* * *

Varric's myth of retribution stood strong years after Anders had stopped using the place. The proximity to the Hawke estate's cellar egress. The solitude. Even the memory, of when this place had provided retreat from the nagging conscience which was not his own. Anders knew nowhere else to go.

Night rolled in through the darkness, the smell of mould and seaweed. He tried to light the fire the hard way.

'You want a hand with that, Blondie?'

His magic trembled in his mind, an uneasy touch. The fingers were not his own. Anders bared his teeth at the fear and forced the flame, flint and striker falling. Tinder became smoke, almost with no time to burn.

'Carver's still with Hawke?'

'He'll have to go back to the Circle tomorrow morning. The last ferry's left.' Varric hesitated, then said, 'He wants to go see Merrill.'

'At this time of night,' Anders said flatly.

'Spring is in the air. Love will find a way. And Merrill never really keeps ordinary hours anyway. Would you like to come?'

'To see Merrill?' He let his fear sound like scorn.

Varric said, 'And to see Fenris. He's only around the corner.'

'My most favourite people,' Anders said, 'the blood mage and the mage hater.'

Said in denial of every shivering thought he had entertained all these months trapped underground, terrified of his own death, clutching at reasons to stay sane.

Varric laughed. 'Look at it this way, at least it's a couple of different faces. After near half a year stuck staring at Hawke and Carver, notwithstanding my own masculine beauty, I'd think you would be grateful.'

Anders wanted to say, Varric I nearly lost it completely Varric he took me over andoverandover the crawling fingers the everything nightmare the loss fear maker Corypheus and Justice and Ella and an hour in that bath and still I am unclean all this blood that I do not remember and Hawke's blood and Carver put his sword through me I have no hope left any more I grab and I grab and nothing holds, nothing stays

Anders said, 'Fine. I have what I owe the elf now, anyway. If after this long he hasn't just decided I am actually dead. We should bring a couple of bottles of wine to soften his disappointment.'

They collected those from Hawke's appropriated cellar, collected the brothers, then ventured again into the Kirkwall night.

'Never knew,' Anders accepted Varric's handkerchief too late to cover the chain of sneezes, 'the bloody elf tree could-- flower--'

Carver snapped, hand raised to Merrill's door, 'Not in my face, mage.'

'I'm not catching.'

'That's not what I heard.'

Hawke said no more than what he gave all the long walk back from the Vimmark. If Carver had won meaning from his brother in the hall of the family estate while Anders took his time in the bath, they weren't telling.

'Do you want me to open that for you?' Varric asked. 'I have a copy of Merrill's key.'

The house was empty, the dust a finger thick. Carver looked lost. Anders sneezed again.

'Not necessarily alarming,' he felt compelled to point out. 'Considering Merrill's usual attention to housekeeping.'

'Her books are still here,' Hawke said.

Carver sneered. 'If the Circle took her, of course they would pause to let her pack her forbidden knowledge.'

'No,' Hawke said patiently. 'They would have burned every page. But here they are. Even the ones written in blood.'

Hawke's patience and reasoning were as disturbing as his new silences. Anders watched Carver struggle to find the appropriate reaction.

'Let's go ask Fenris,' Varric ran his fingers across the gritty table. 'He was our second stop. If he doesn't know, he probably knows someone who does.'

'Alienages,' Anders agreed. 'Rife with gossip and marriage and angry drunks. Maybe that's what happened. Merrill married an angry drunk.'

Relieved to be offered the target Hawke refused to be, Carver glared at Anders happily. Anders sneezed on him again.

'That sounded like a fart, magey.'

'I was trying to stifle it. The sneeze, not the-- I mean. There was no fart.'

'I can always ask Justice if you're lying.'

'You could,' Anders said. 'I wouldn't.'

It was the templar who narrowed his eyes.

Hawke said, without inflexion, 'Merrill's mirror is gone.'

It was the little brother who said, 'Oh, no.'

Varric led them into the alienage proper. The permanent structures grew progressively less, between them the shacks with lives spilling through the imperfect structures.

There was music in the alienage, because there were few true walls.

Anders heard the voice before he saw. Then he saw.

The white shirt reoccurred. Dwindling ahead, stained gold by lanterns and candles. Anders watched the pale sleeves. The hands moving carefully.  
The hair was still brutally short. Pale, thick as velvet, jagged around the hairline and licking the skin, sharp tongues of silver. Fenris sat easily on a crate, knees wide, shirtsleeves loose and unlaced at the wrists. The leather vest was undone, shirt fastened only slightly higher beneath. With his shoulders hunched forward the collarbones showed, curve and hollow. In one hand he held a broad fan of circular cards, making marriages between the pairs.

The fan was offered without emphasis or satisfaction.

Swearing, Donnic kicked the crate serving as table. The abundance of used mugs clattered, the candles clustered between them wavering. 'How do you bloody--'  
'You strategise too much. I am all bluff.' Fenris grinned in consolation, easy and unshadowed. 'This is why you never make higher than common guard.'

'Should've stuck to diamondback. At least you forbear from the insults when it's all strategy and no chance.'

The grin still, lifting the corners of the face with crease or concern. Fenris looked up. Candlelight caught in the green.

Unwise, that scatter of light they shared on the crate between them. Fenris would be blinded against any approach. Seeing nothing but four shapes in the dark, one in templar armour.

Without hesitation, Varric trotted forward, lithe, and placed one finger across his lips, a plea for silence.

Fenris dropped his gaze to the candles. 'Consider ourselves both lucky Aveline chose not to come tonight. I would rather not devolve to wrestling again just so she has a chance.'

'Not still sore, are you?' Donnic rubbed his nape.

'She is, I'm sure.' Such a decadent purr for the austere frame. Anders shivered guiltily.

'Ah, I shouldn't laugh.'

'Not where she can hear you,' Fenris agreed.

'I love my wife,' Donnic cupped his hands before him. 'Every inch of her firm, competitive thighs--'

Having sidled stealthy into range, Varric cleared his throat at Donnic's ear.

After the terror, consternation, then outrage faded, there was the awkward affair of handshakes and partial embraces and clapping of shoulders and upper arms.

Donnic returned to Hawke and held his wrist, hand over hand. 'I can't believe you're still alive.'

'If we must be official about it,' Hawke said.

'The city has missed her champion. It was almost half a year. Another couple of months and the bank would have released your will.'

To avoid looking at Fenris, Anders examined the abandoned cards. 'If you prefer, we could be a hallucination caused by the excessive stress of owing your firstborn to an elf. That was a truly terrible hand.'

'You'll be waiting for a while,' Donnic warned Fenris, who tched, 'And what would I want with a human.'

'Which one of you masochists decided to play Sailor's Spite? Not for the faint of heart.'

'I did,' Fenris replied, to Anders directly. 'Though Bodahn taught it to us as Malice.'

Anders felt himself still, helpless. Trying to remind himself that everything he imagined of Fenris in the depths of that shithole, everything that happened to him, Fenris could not know of it.

Anders felt as resilient as rubble.

Into the crackling calm, Donnic said, 'Where have you been all this time?'

'Long story,' Hawke said.

Varric groaned. 'Try, trapped in a grey warden prison with cultists and darkspawn and these three idiots tripping over every trap, walking into archer ambushes around every corner. Blondie here gets stabbed in the back three times and once in the bloody gut, Hawke decides he's missed his calling as a pincushion. As for little Hawke-- Sometimes I wonder why I bother waking up in the morning.'

Carver ignored him. 'Fenris, where's Merrill? We went to her house but there was no sign--'

Bemused, Fenris looked from Varric to Carver, then looked at his feet and clenched his toes.

'Merrill.'

The air went out of Carver. He sat on the crate Donnic had abandoned, which creaked ominously.

'No.'

Fenris looked abashed. 'Ah. Nothing so dire. Merrill visits with her clan.'

'One day she might even forgive Fenris,' Donnic said, with sidelong mirth.

'If the witch condescends to speak with me--'

'Please don't start again,' cried a girl, successfully both cross and apologetic, from the door of what Anders presumed was meant to be a house.

Fenris crossed his arms at her, scowling.

Rubbing sleep from her eyes, the elf girl gave him a woeful stare. 'You threw her mirror off the cliff.'

'Hardly a cliff.'

'Master Hawke, Master Anders.' A bobbed curtsey. 'The First shouted, but Fenris moved through every glyph she cast. She asked him very nicely not to, and then she even begged him. She was heartbroken for days.'

'More an escarpment,' Fenris said. 'Not a cliff.'

'Broody,' Varric said, 'the details aren't ever as important as the motivation.'

'You,' Hawke said. 'Destroyed the mirror.'

Carver said hesitantly, 'Merrill must be so mad. The eluvian meant everything to her.'

'It was possessed.'

Hawke said, 'But the mirror was--'

With the conviction of a priest, Fenris said, 'It spoke with a demon's voice.'

Carver stared at his brother. Then he moved for Fenris, fast enough the elf girl yelped in fear.  
Fenris danced neat away from Carver's unrelenting march, putting the crates and the small crowd between them. With fluid motion, there was a sword sudden in his hand, incongruously short.

'Not again,' Varric said. 'These two--'

Carver did not pay note to the sword or Fenris' outstretched hand, until the palm smacked against his armour and stopped him.

For Fenris would not retreat.

'Thank you.' Carver did not know what to do with his hands, and put them on Fenris' shoulders. 'I never found the courage. Because she would hate me if I...'

Fenris lowered the sword. 'I am not afraid of hate.'

'Perhaps the eluvian was everything Merrill thought it could be,' Hawke said warningly. 'With what we know about certain history now, little brother, the mirror could well have been key.'

Carver said, 'Say you were right. The sodding mirror was the gateway to the Maker's castle in the sky. Let someone else lose themselves to it. Not Merrill. Not you.'

Fenris lowered his palm.

'Thank you,' Carver said again, fervently.

Fenris nodded once.

'A toast to perpetuating ignorance,' Anders produced his trump. 'Luckily, I brought wine.'

'My wine,' Hawke said.

'Broody's wine,' Varric corrected.

'This is...Danarius' wine?' Fenris took the bottle Anders held in his direction, fingers carefully not touching.

'There's a point when even appropriation gets old,' Varric said dryly.

'Fenris,' the girl said nervously. 'Please don't forget. My shift starts very soon.'

Focusing on the label, Fenris' reply was curt. 'Of course I remember.'

'I'm sorry--'

Fenris cut her off. 'I will escort Orana to work. The night is never safe. Another time, Hawke, Varric--'

'But I can take Orana,' Donnic said. 'The Hanged Man is not so far from my way.'

'The Hanged Man,' Varric exclaimed. 'Perfect. Just the direction I was heading. It's embarrassing watching humans try to drink. But Orana would know that.'

'I'm only in the kitchen, messere,' her hands moved over each other, eyes darting to Fenris.

'Varric Tethras, at your service.' Varric bowed. 'Practically as neighbours.'

Fenris growled, 'Back. Dwarf.'

'Now, Fenris. Your precious little pearl is as safe with me as with, well, her maiden aunt, if it came to that.'

'Orana is not my pearl. Orana is a flawless diamond.'

The plain little elf girl blushed hopelessly.

Soft as sin, Hawke's voice. The beard pricked at Anders' ear. 'Try not to wear it on your face.'

Of all the things to confess, curled together in a prison they would never be free of, painted black with his own blood. Stay with me, Anders. When we get out of this. What will you do. What will you do differently.

Of all the things to regret. The scars across his palm. The violence he longed to commit. Telling Hawke this was the least of them.

As Donnic and Varric led Orana away, Fenris stood awkwardly, staring into the street. From behind a worn spot showed in his leathers, halfway between buttock and knee.

'Hawke. You should return to your estate. It gets cold very swiftly, and there is little enough room inside--' Fenris gestured helplessly at the shack.

'This is fine,' and Hawke smiled, with usual effect.

Fenris softened in form and function, and smiled back.

The interior held a collection of crates, stacked to serve as shelves. Fabric and ribbons, buttons and shiny things. String, wool, utensils. A packrat's paradise. A mattress filled the other half of the room, with enough blankets and pillows it could rightly be called a nest. An unshielded lantern in the middle filled the corners with glow.

There was a doll on the bed. No bigger than a palm, with blue buttons for eyes and black felt hair, and an unmistakable beard.

Fenris cleared his throat and picked it up, trying to hide it with his hands. Standing awkwardly, he looked at them, then at the doll.

The furrowed brow smoothed.

'Orana makes things,' he said.

One whole row of the crates were filled with similar dolls, rabbits and kossith and halla. Fenris returned blackbeard to his place, on the topmost shelf, next to a cluster of companions Anders desperately did not want to recognise, and three thin books.

Hawke propped his staff against the wall, next to the shelves.

'She was Hadriana's slave. I forgot about her.'

'Orana never will,' Harshly. Then Fenris softened again, looking at the dolls. 'She remembers the coin you gave her, Hawke. Enough to seed an ambition in her.'

Anders eyed the narrow strip of bare floor doubtfully. 'Should we bring in the crates to sit on?'

'Take the bed. Except for Carver. He should take a crate. His armour will rip the sheets.'

'Never so glad to be a mage,' Hawke toppled into the nest with a groan.

Anders eased next to him. The sheets were still warm, and smelled like girl. 'So this is your place?'

'It is a place,' Fenris said.

Carver dutifully brought in his crate, positioned so he could lean against the only solid wall for a back. Fenris distributed mismatched cups, thick pottery with chipped yet cheerful glaze. He set a small burner to a clear patch of floor clear of three sets of outstretched legs, raised the flame to a steady glow, filled a tin pot with water from a large container by the door. He set it to boil and added a handful of leaves.

'Tea,' Anders said, disbelievingly.

Fenris uncorked the wine with his teeth, then added the cork to a collection on the shelves.

'I overdid the bottle a few times,' Fenris said, with no change in inflexion. 'I lost a lot of time. When I realised you were gone.'

Fenris closed his teeth on the words so hard Anders heard the clunk.

'And you just stopped drinking?'

Fenris flipped the uncorked bottle with a gracious wrist, and pulled his trailing shirtsleeve to above the elbow. 'I frightened Orana.'

Twist of weight or wrist or waist. His posture changed. The shoulders aligned and proud, tilt of chin making a fluid line along tattooed throat, and from spine to heel. Eyelids lowered, lashes long and dark against the cheek. The bottle held horizontal by a single fingertip placed a third of the way along the body, curl of thumb tucked into the base.

Effortless balance, if Anders could not see the muscle pull firm under skin and lyrium.

Arm still, mouth touched chipped cup until liquid quivered, surrendered, spilled. The downcast eyes raised once, then Fenris straightened, lingering, and the last tremulous drop contemplated its fall.

'Mage.'

And moved to Hawke's cup.

Anders startled when Hawke elbowed him.

'Sorry? You said something?'

'I thought you did not like wine,' Fenris repeated, lips curving.

Hawke and Carver were both staring at Anders, as Fenris serviced their cups with his impossible pour. Intimidating was not the word.

'Wine is hardly real drinking. I mean. Uh.'

'Shut up,' Carver suggested.

Fenris selected a place for the bottle on the shelves, then picked out a pillow to sit on. One knee up, arm slung loosely over the patched bend. He faced the room, back to the door without discomfort.

'You never poured like that for me,' Hawke noted.

'You never brought me wine.'

'In fact,' Carver added, 'you stole his wine, brother.'

'Fenris stole it first,' Hawke replied. 'At least I waited until I thought he was dead.'

Intensely, Fenris studied the pot not quite boiling.

'That's not true,' Anders said. 'Fenris.'

The blank eyes raised and lowered, stuttering.

'When we were down there, I thought we would die with you never knowing--'

Hawke sighed, for no reason at all.

'We were coming for you,' Anders said. 'That very night. We would have found you even without circumstance bringing you into the street. Even Varric was looking for you, he found a Tranquil merchant selling pieces of reworked spirit hide. By the time I told Varric our suspicions, he already had his own. And almost a full compliment if you ever wanted to piece your old armour back together. We would have found you. You weren't alone.'

Fenris' throat worked. 'Varric has my old armour.'

'If you want it back.'

'I also had some suspicions,' Carver said, embarrassed. 'Alrik was not circumspect. He wrote his actual madness on paper and presented it to the Grand Cleric as if in no fear of reprisal. The association between himself and Karras was under some suspicion.'

'I would have torn the city apart,' Hawke said, hollow and hard. 'After Anders killed Karras and I knew--'

Fenris said, 'You killed Karras.'

'He was running Alrik's errands. I thought it would be Alrik there. A mage warned me of the abuse committed on the Tranquil. The mage was killed, or killed himself after telling me of the pair's latest ploy. The bastards were petitioning to make all mages Tranquil. Because we would have been more productive. Rip us of everything which makes us mortal and thinking, feeling beings, turned iinto parts of the Chantry machine, endlessly manufacturing--'

Hawke struck Anders on the arm. Fenris was breathing hard.

'Alain,' Fenris panted. 'The mage who killed himself. They branded him for blood magic.'

'How did you.'

Anders snapped his mouth shut. There was only one way Fenris could have known.

'Your tea is boiling,' Anders said weakly.

Fenris sucked in a hard breath, rigid. 'Did you make it hurt, when you killed Karras?'

Hawke said fiercely, 'He ripped the man apart in a fit of rage.'

Fenris looked unflinching at Anders, and waited.

Anders said, 'I ripped the man apart in a fit of rage.'

A curl of lip. 'Good.'

And Fenris continued, painfully calm. 'There was a sense of someone missing that night. A mourning that I could not kill them all. If it was Karras, then I owe you again, mage.'

He used a doubled up scarf to hold the heated pot, a prosaic action warming for its simplicity and ease, and poured his cup of tea.

Anders drank the wine without touching his tongue, heat hitting his belly hard.

'Surely it was not that tale alone which brings you to my doorstep in the dead of night after a trek to and through and from a grey warden prison, simply to tell me I had not been forgotten?'

Carver protested. 'I wanted to see Merrill.'

'I wanted to know if you'd carried on the same interior scheme as the last place,' Hawke said, with a trace of his old self.

'Corpses and wine on the walls? How Hightown.'

'I prefer the dolls,' Hawke agreed.

'Orana sells them at market on feastdays.' Fenris reached for a lower shelf, full of blue and grey, tossing a figure across the room. 'This one is Alistair.'

Hawke grinned, mirthless. 'A productive girl. I hope she keeps you in the comfort you deserve.'

'The bed is always warm. A benefit of sharing in shifts. Orana sleeps days, and I sleep-- whenever.'

'Ugh,' Carver said. 'They're seven beds short in the barracks too. Nothing worse than rolling into sheets still warm from someone else.'

'Orana probably smells nicer than templar recruits. Here, brother, breathe in this pillow--'

'Sniff her pillow and I cut your head off,' Fenris said mildly.

Anders looked into his empty cup and mourned. The bottle's wet mouth intruded, tipping gracious in refill.

'Uh. Thanks.'

Fenris nodded, settling with the wine close by. 'Tell me about the grey warden prison. I did not think the structure was built which could hold you for so long.'

'Oh, brother,' Carver said, disgusted. 'Let me tell you about the bloody carta.'

Hawke grimaced. 'My father was a blood mage.'

'There was this magister,' Anders blurted.

Fenris looked from one to the other.

'You should have been there,' Hawke said. 'Especially when it came to the magister. Though if you could have found that shrivelled old heart to rip out--'

'Maybe we should start at the beginning,' Carver said.

'Right,' Hawke said. 'A carta assassin tried to scalp me in my bathroom. Because headwounds bleed the most, I assume. Because they were after my blood.'

'Our blood,' Carver said, peevish.

They left the telling to Carver, who seemed less affected by the wine, or perhaps more used to the orderly debriefing a commanding officer would expect, though Hawke punctuated him where necessary. Fenris asked few questions, and the embarrassing parts were kept silent, where they huddled against scant fire starving to death, carefully saying nothing about Anders' continued inability to heal. The days when they kept Anders bound and tugged him along at the end of a rope. When Varric had punched Hawke in the balls, driven beyond endurance by a wit which was utterly misnamed. What they had resorted to eating. The time lost patching self inflicted wounds.

In the end, Fenris rose to top their cups with the second bottle, then raised his tea and said, 'Death to magisters.'

'Death to magisters,' Carver echoed.

'Death to magisters,' Hawke said.

'Death to darkspawn magisters,' Anders felt compelled to say, 'and the slave-keeping type.'

'There are no other kinds,' Fenris said. 'That there are two types is bad enough.'

But when Fenris sat down this time, it was not on the pillow on the dusty floor, and instead on the mattress.

Anders panicked silently. Then he shuffled against Hawke's immoveable mass to make some room.

Fenris was still a long, hard heat against his side.

A silence fell.

Fenris stretched his leg to match Anders', warm leather against the trouser fabric and rucked coat, bare foot flexing.

'You have flat feet.'

'You have ugly boots.'

'I think I'm drunk.'

Fenris punched him in the thigh without pause.

After some time, Anders said, 'ow.'

'Three second rule,' Hawke drawled. 'If it takes you longer than three seconds to notice, pay the forfeit.'

'Isabela's rule,' Carver mused. 'Once I managed to get an olive down her cleavage--'

'She noticed,' Fenris said. 'She was saving it for me.'

'In your dreams, elfy.'

Hawke sighed, and this time it was with reason.

'We should head back to the estate, brother. No doubt we'll be off to Sundermount first thing tomorrow.'

Carver looked uncomfortable. 'The Knight-Captain is unlikely to extend my leave even further.'

'Cullen does anything I ask.' Hawke wiggled his fingers. 'It's almost like blood magic.'

'Ah, don't joke! You do it so terribly.'

'I agree,' Fenris said.

His amusement rolled through Anders like thunder.

Hawke rose to disentangle his staff from the weaponry against the wall. For all the door hardly touched the top, bottom or sides of the frame, it let in a surprising amount of additional cold when opened.

Anders arched forward to sneeze, thudding back into place beside Fenris on the recoil.

'Spring,' Hawke announced to the street, in disgust. 'Without even a blanket of clouds to keep the warmth in.'

'That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,' Carver declaimed. His hand landed between Hawke's shoulder blades and pushed. 'Come on, this cold won't kill you.'

'Carver,' Fenris said. 'Your greatsword.'

'Keep it. For earning Merrill's wrath and sparing me the fall-- worth a templar blade.' Carver flashed a sudden, rare grin, the similarity between sibs never more apparent as then. 'Besides. That toothpick you were holding before almost made me wet myself laughing.'

Fenris growled.

The door slotted approximately closed, the brothers Hawke echoing along the street.

'I should probably go. Or I'll be running fast to avoid the thugs, all on my own.'

'You should probably go,' Fenris agreed.

The body against his did not move.

If he shifts his arm, Anders thought, I will get up and go.

The heat from the arm soaked through Anders' robe, unrelenting.

If he so much as shifts his weight forward, Anders thought. Or twitches at all.

Every part of Fenris was melting with unerring consistency into his flank.

Then Fenris said, 'I forgot to give Hawke back his clothes.'

'You still have them?'

'Washed and pressed, even. On the shelf.'

'I can grab them now, run to catch up. Which shelf?'

Now Fenris would have to stand up to show Anders, and hand the clothes to him, and Anders could bid him farewell and depart.

Fenris said, 'The third crate on the right.'

Anders squinted against his doubled vision, forgot what he was looking for, and realised Fenris, warm and hard, was not planning to move.

He held his wine in the arm resting against Fenris. Reach his other hand over, carefully transfer the cup, bring it to his lips. Only a mouthful left. Not enough to unknot his throat.

Fenris held the wine bottle in his other hand, too. He reached across and poured, without looking, stopping at the brim, and without moving a single muscle on the side pressed against Anders.

'I fail to see how that ever intimidated a magister,' Anders decided to say.

'You are not a magister.'

'Are magisters so terribly afraid of wine?'

'Are you as tired as you sound, or simply drunk?'

'Simply tired, and hardly drunk.'

'I believe you,' Fenris said, unconvincingly.

'I lost it,' Anders said. 'In the prison. I lost control the night I killed Karras, too. The night we found you. I could claim it was to Justice, but not for years now. There's a rising wall of terror, and anger, then my actions and words take place as if on the wall's other side. The first was the worst, I went for Hawke for no reason, I summoned shades. Varric screaming at me, and Carver took me down, and Maker, but it hurt. When I got up I thanked them for beating me down. Fenris. I thanked them for hurting me because at least I could feel it was me being hurt--'

'Hush,' Fenris said, hesitantly.

The wine was going everywhere.

'You poured it too full,' Anders complained.

Fenris set aside the cup for him. The free, fine hand collected spilled wine from Anders' skin, the lined palm like warm parchment.

The cursed shaking would not stop.

'I was so afraid I would do it again. I asked them to bind me. They bound me for weeks. Even if they tried to tie me loosely I said no. Had to hurt. I was a liability. The only way I could continue with that voice in my head, sure I would not kill them while they slept.'

Fenris explored Anders' sleeve, wet with wine. 'There is still rope burn on your wrists.'

'I can't heal.'

'You healed me.'

'I don't know why it worked that night. For months before, I couldn't. I closed down the clinic.'

'I went looking for you there. Two years abandoned, the locals told me. Nearly three, now.'

'Why did you go looking for me?'

After a long silence, Fenris said, 'For the coin you owe me.'

Except Anders felt the pressure against him, flesh and silent want. And Fenris' breath was almost his own, having both turned to examine the other. The compact between their shoulders was a formal gesture of solidarity, scarcely flesh at all.

'My coin purse is in my trousers,' Anders breathed, 'under my robes. If you really want it so bad.'

Fenris shook violently.

'Stop laughing at me,' Anders said. 'I'm quite fragile when I'm drunk.'

'Mage,' Fenris grinned, crooked as his eyebrows.

There was a quiet, a calm. Fenris' hand moved against him, eyes lidding sleepily.

Anders took the hand and turned it.

'So many lines.' He didn't mean the lyrium. The skin itself was seamed dark, shiny with use. 'The Rivaini read futures from palms, did you know?' Anders opened his hand beside Fenris'. 'I only have a few hard lines. They all stop. A clear future. Your palm is full of them. Like a web.'

'An indefinite future,' Fenris asked. 'But for the scars.'

'Or a complicated one. I'm making this up. I don't know how to read palms.'

He brought Fenris' hand to his lips and licked the spilled wine.

But Fenris clenched his fist. He pulled his hand away, gently.

'No. Not your mouth.'

'I'm sorry,' Anders said shakily. 'I forgot.'

As if time had leaped past Anders' attention, Fenris asked, 'What will you have for breakfast?'

'It's the middle of the night, last I checked.'

'I like forethought.'

'Um. What's on offer?'

'Porridge.'

'And?'

'Porridge.'

Exasperated, Anders said, 'Then why even ask, if there's no real choice?'

'Because if you had asked for something else, I would have gone to buy it before you woke.'

'Oh,' Anders said. 'Now I can't decide. Weighing inconvenience against desire, such a difficult judgment. I want fruit.'

'Fruit.'

'What we had to eat down there, Fenris. Not so many orchards.'

'Fruit,' Fenris said, and, 'so you will stay?'

Anders said, 'I thought that was a moot point, to be honest.'

He could have breathed into Fenris' mouth, swallowed his breath in return until the taste of tea and living warmth destroyed the sickening cobwebs Corypheus left behind.

Then Fenris' lids slid closed, opening wide again, as if startled.

Inexorable, the fall. And tempting. The second time Fenris' head nodded, Anders brought them both down, the wall sliding behind their shoulders. Without opening his eyes, Fenris rolled from side to back, one arm over his brow and palm exposed, fingers curled as if around the hilt of an absent sword.  
Having not bothered to buckle boots or coat on leaving Hawke's estate, Anders rid himself of the encumbrance without rising and pulled the abundant covers high.

The walls were cold, the centre warm. His back to Fenris, because that was how they lay when chill and inadequate campsites pushed them together before.

Apparently he slept. Anders woke with morning spilling through the gaps and a cold place beside him.

A hand on his shoulder. 'Stay. Sleep.'

'-- not slept since Amaranthine.'

Headache tightening. Scrape of steel, fabric rustling, deft change of clothes. Anders kept his lids closed even if his ears felt cold and sharp as a sword, straining for promises made in sound. Morning chill bled through the door, then receded.

Anders rolled to his back and examined the sagging roof. Fenris never bothered to walk quietly, padding away through the dirt. Anders' chest tightened on his next breath.

In a bed Fenris shared with another, Anders' first true waking thought was of Hawke.

Because he had last slept with Hawke, of course. Arms tied across his chest, with Hawke pressed into the curve of him for sanity's sake. Anders I have you, you're safe, you sleep.

Fearing he would wake and find himself prisoned in his own body, the culpable witness. Lying in the bath in Hawke's estate, wrapped in the surreal disbelief of their survival, staring at Hawke's ceiling and fearing the vast empty space of Carver's appropriated bed.

He brought this fear to Fenris' place and Fenris' bed, without a qualm, and slept too deep for darkspawn to find him.

Because Fenris had always known the risk, Anders thought. Fenris accepted knowledge of Justice with the same wary disdain as Anders' manifesto and Merrill's bloody palms.

Anders crossed his arms over his chest against the hurt.

Now he was thinking of Ella.

A name he knew from the days when the mage underground still had sufficient strength that Justice found merit in their action. Three years of abuse, Karras had mocked her for, and now she tried to run? Anders had killed the bastard, and Ella had proved strong enough to hate him for something else.

Justice knew exactly how to react around templar fear. But to see a mage's fear--

Anders grunted, clenched his fists, thought about his hangover. There was no separation in reaction for all the spirit could consume him at will. Unfair. The panic prodding now at thoughts of Ella, was not Anders' panic.

Anders focused on his shame. Justice fled from shame.

He had killed her because he had never thought what might happen if a mage reacted with fear. Justice had less knowledge of this world than a child. Anders had done nothing to educate him, only fed him more rage, fear, frustration.

Anders learned early that he needed people to react in ways Justice expected. Lirene's respectful offerings, the mindful worship found at the clinic, the blind support of the mage underground. Tailor his presentation to tailor the reaction: that was how he had kept Justice contained, with no surprises.

Hawke's rivalry was a challenge, but Hawke believed in Justice's ideals, just not his methods. Integrity was not always measured by the same yardstick.

A complicated thought for Justice.

The fault was his, for not teaching Justice better. Anders did not flinch. But he should not share the burden with Fenris any more than with Hawke.

He did not know why he was here. Everything he felt was suspect.

From his coin purse, Anders counted the requisite dividends in gold instead of silver, placing the teetering stack on a shelf. He positioned grey warden dolls to guard, a biting nostalgia.

His stockings were sticky with sleep against the cold floor. Anders sat again to put on his boots, then cradled his head for an aching moment.

Stand and go.

Except when he opened the door, there was a lonely pear on the doorstep.

Anders' resolution wavered under the onslaught.

By the time Fenris reappeared, walking into the empty square yoked into hauling water, Anders was licking pear juice off his palms.

Fenris did not look his way. Two yokes, crossed behind his nape with his hands and forearms along the length before him for counterbalance, clustered buckets swinging smoothly at the ends. A sleek, swaying grace to keep the swinging buckets from the spill, so different from the battlefield stance. The posture precise, stomach made concave under proud ribs, each deep breath visible, forceful, steady.

The lyrium curls showed through where sweat stuck thin linen to skin, along spine and the centreline of Fenris' chest. High contrast.

'You should eat more,' Anders called.

A palmful of water splashed free from each bucket as Fenris stopped. His eyes stayed fixed across the square. 'I told you to sleep.' Strained.

'I was hungry,' Anders said.

Fenris inhaled so deeply against the weight, unbowed, even the length of his throat thickened. 'I am sorry. There was not much fruit at market.'

'That's not what I...Look, do you want a hand?'

'No.' A brief thaw. 'I will be done shortly.'

Fenris went to the door of the square's one big, solid building, opening it with a heel and a practiced knock of knee. When he emerged with empty buckets, Anders followed him through the alienage.

'Penance?'

Fenris eyed him quizzically. 'Bath time.'

'That makes so much sense. Bath time. Of course.'

Quirk and smirk, almost to a smile. 'A thing I miss from Tevinter,' Fenris said carefully. 'The plumbing.'

'Well, it did save your life.'

Anders' back creaked in sympathy, watching Fenris rise beneath the weight. Not without strain, from the heaving breath. Fresh sweat chased the old, the brow creasing.

This time Anders followed him into the house. Buckets just shy of brushing the walls, Fenris led the way into a room graced with a squat, fat tub and associated paraphernalia.

'Speaking of plumbing. The lav?'

Fenris added a bucket's contents to the tub, frowning in real thought this time.

'I cannot take you there at this hour,' he said eventually. 'Unless you want to be stoned for a pervert shem?'

'That's a new one.'

'Merrill's house. Or find a convenient corner. If you do the latter, ensure no one sees you.'

'Elf eyes fall out of their head if a human exposes himself to them?'

'Yes. Of course.'

'But you have such pretty eyes,' Anders said.

Likely because he was still drunk.

Fenris hefted the empty bucket. Anders escaped through the door just in time, projectile hitting the backswing.

A convenient corner involved stepping over a snoring elf's outstretched legs, where he slept in a gap between more permanent structures, wearing three coats and still no shoes. Tucked between elbow and torso was a familiar bottle.

They never did get through the whole second bottle last night. Somewhere along the way, Fenris had learned generosity, at least.

Stumbling back into the square, Anders caught Fenris by the door of the house, in a full body stretch which exposed a strip of belly to the air. Water spilled somewhere along the way turned more of the linen shirt transparent, clinging to skin.

Anders stopped. Walked closer helplessly. 'What is that?'

Fenris lowered his arms and looked around, wary.

Anders pointed at the wet shirt, the lines of dark ink showing through. 'You have a tattoo.'

'I have many tattoos.'

'A new tattoo. Show me.'

'No.'

'Why not? Is it a pair of breasts?'

'No.'

'I've seen Carver's tattoo, to my misfortune. It does indeed bark. Please show me?'

The fingers were uncertain on the wet hem.

'You want to,' Anders said. Disbelievingly.

Because Fenris inched the hem higher.

The lyrium was familiar, a sparing inlay across the belly, one thick trunk from neck and through the shallow navel, directly beneath the rolled waistband of wet breeches. The new black ink filled space to the left of centre, elvhen script starting on the lowest rib and finishing just above the hip.

Fenris pulled down his shirt before Anders could touch.

'Did it hurt?'

'Comparatively? No.'

'Without comparison?'

'Discomforting,' Fenris said. 'But the artist was deft.'

'What does it say?'

'Only names,' Fenris smoothed his shirt and said, 'that I will not forget again.'

This time inside the house, an elf girl in the hall startled at the sight of them. A woman, Anders corrected, staring at him if not Fenris. She looked at him with some wistful hope, yearning, the suddenly her face was so still it could have been a painted mask, and Anders wondered at what he had seen.

'Aleissa, this is Anders. He is another of Hawke's friends.'

'I-- thought you were someone else.'

'Sorry,' Anders said. 'I guess I'm not.'

Aleissa looked away, an almost arrogant dismissal, 'Fen, can you please send the children through to their bath when they're done?' and went into the bathroom without further word.

Fenris shifted his weight, hunched and embarrassed.

Anders took pity. 'Landlords, eh? Do I smell porridge?'

The children numbered over twenty. An elderly elf distributed bowls, ignoring Fenris's arrival, and Fenris was no more awkward than always. Which left the wide, bright eyes of the children staring at Anders uninterrupted.

He knew how to do this, once.

'They're not all yours, are they?'

The guffaw burst out of elderly elf lady, and Fenris said a dirty word, '-- no!'

The children, chaotic and unbearable, devolved into hysteria for likely no better reason than seeing Fenris do something other than slouch through their midst, so Anders assumed.

Still grinning, the elf lady shoved a bowl at his middle. Anders sat on the floor, children leaning against his knees to peer at his ears, so close he could feel their breath on his cheek. Hunting desperately for Fenris, he found him stretching for a jar on a high shelf.

The children whispered and nudged each other eagerly.

'If I give you some,' Fenris announced, 'you will line up after your meal and bathe without causing complaint for Lannavie or Aleissa.'

The chorus of affirmation was vibrantly insincere. But Fenris distributed honey without fear.

A little hand planted on Anders' knee, leaving a star shaped print of indeterminate substance.

'Hello,' said the boy. 'You look like Alistair.'

'Do I?'

'Except for your hair.' The boy produced a snail and put it on Anders' boot. 'Alistair had less prickles on his face.'

Now there were two snails.

The boy saw where Anders was staring. 'This is Number Two Alistair, and Number Three Goldanna. Number Two got broken.'

Fenris said, 'Tabris! No.'

Anders nearly leapt to his feet.

The child whined. 'But they're my friends.'

'Outside friends.'

Tabris poked out his tongue.

'That's how the Tevinters cut them off,' Lannavie said, in passing. 'Poke it out further and we'll see who here slices it off.'

Tabris looked at Fenris, who nodded gravely.

The boy pressed his dirty hands over his mouth and sat scowling silently. Shuddering, Anders put the snails in his empty bowl and gifted them back to the disgruntled child.

'There are approximately seventeen children called Tabris in the alienage,' Fenris said, as if he had not noticed Anders' start at the name. 'No few girls called Kallian, or a variance of. There are not so many heroes elves can overlook the one. Even a Fereldan.'

Anders thought, still they and never us for Fenris, even sitting surrounded by elf children ignoring him with adorable affection lest he startle and flee, what will it bloody take for him.

'I knew her.'

'I know.'

'Whatever they say about her now, you know she ran away. Just like the best of us, hey? Said she couldn't go home. Worn by burdens she never wanted, unable to help the people she actually wanted to help. We do what we must for the victory, but if the battle was never yours to begin with, then what does victory even mean. That's what she said.'

'She did not learn,' Fenris said, 'Victory is surviving. She was your friend?'

The words did not exist. 'People like Tabris don't have friends. They have consuming passions or vast indifferences. Small room for friends.'

'She sounds like you.'

'Well. I liked her.'

When the time came, and miraculously, the children progressed to their baths without turmoil. 'You know they only do that because they like you. Not for any amount of honey.'

'It is a game,' Fenris acknowledged.

'Not that I ever expected you to resort to bribery.'

Fenris said, 'They are too accustomed to threats.'

As the room cleared, Anders took Tabris' friends outside and left the bowl against the wall by the stair, where they would find freedom eventually. Fenris nudged the bowl with the side of his foot, as if trying to provoke action.

'Tabris wants to be a magister,' Fenris said.

'Ah. Has he shown signs?'

'Of dominance or magic?' A shrug. 'His mother was a mage. She made pastry at a Hightown bakery.'

'What happened?'

Fenris said, with as little expression as Aleissa wore, 'She fell in love and left Kirkwall.'

After a moment, Anders said, 'At least it wasn't templars.'

They went to Fenris' place, where Fenris looked at the stack of coin and the warden guardians, and took a bathsheet from a different shelf.

'I need to wash.'

'It's not that bad. I can hardly smell you at all.'

The wide and unreadable eyes. 'You cannot follow me. There are other elves.'

'Pervert shem again, is it? All right, I'll wait here.' Anders fell to the nest with relief, pushing at his unbuckled boots.

Whether Fenris sprinted the distance, or bathed as quick as a douse and a cursory rub, he was back before Anders could drift into the dazed second sleep of his hangover.

Anders slitted his eyes, shadowed under his arm.

Shivering uncontrollably, with the wet sheet draped over shoulders like a scarf, breeches dripping water that smelled of cold and soap and ocean. Fenris bent to gather a second towel.

The muscle of his back moved under the lyrium scars, each ridge as defined as those on his belly. Even the smallest muscles expressed their presence in ridge and furrow and intensity. Flesh stretching frugal across bone, the notches of an exposed spine.

As Fenris chafed himself warm and dry before dressing, undershirt and leather trousers and armoured vest, even the sidelong views were flat as a board. Not even the old trace curve of wine-softened belly above belt. No slight swell of masculine breast. Flatness, from collarbone to hip, the visible striation of sinew interlocking with sinew. The sight was almost as painful as memory of the templars' cruel reduction.

An armour forged of muscle, Anders thought, and wondered at the grief.

Then the last buckle was done, the gift of a templar sword hefted, tested, donned. Fenris turned more quickly than Anders expected.

'You are awake again.'

'Only just,' Anders said.

Fenris did not contest. He went outside and waited for Anders to catch him up.

They walked through the alienage without aim, chewing sticks of mint. Life swelled and stirred around them. If elven eyes turned to Anders a time too many, lingered with suspicion a heartbeat too long, there was no evident aggression.

Fenris did not appear to notice. 'I have a lesson today,' he said eventually.

They were in the main hex, watching three elves repainting the markings at the base of the Vhenadahl.

'Do you want me to go,' Anders asked.

'I am not used to an audience.'

'I can be quiet.'

'Orana will return soon. She will need the bed. There is nowhere for you to stay in the alienage alone without causing affront.'

'I could return to the estate. I probably have things I should do after half a year. You could come later. Tonight. After you walk Orana to work again.'

'Tonight,' Fenris said, uneasily.

'Hawke won't be there. He's in Sundermount with Carver.'

'Tonight,' Fenris said.

'Or I could follow you around your daily chores. I am a little hung over, you might have noticed. I would probably find a corner and doze.'

Fenris looked away from the tree and at him directly, head tilted.

'I don't really want to be alone,' Anders said, and sneezed. 'Bloody tree!'

They went to the headman's house. He wore plain clothes with fine embroidered cuffs, and actual shoes. He peered at Fenris without acknowledging the trailing human.

'This is Anders. He is Hawke's friend.'

'Is he your friend?'

'Or close enough.'

The harhen frowned at Fenris with all the disapproval of the ages.

Hesitant, Fenris said to Anders, 'This is important to me and I will not have you mock.'

'Truly, Fenris. I can be quiet. I promise.'

Such a doubtful arching of eyebrows.

One window caught the morning light. The two elves sat in the room's only chairs, Fenris on the one with no back. There was a large tray of fine, damp sand between them, as wide and long as the table.

Anders propped himself in the corner on a cushion, studiously examining the wall of books.

Fenris held a stylus, discomforted. The harhen said:

'As children they resented the indestructibility of objects, and as children the magisters declared, we shall know all. The People who heard and also hungered, opened the way for the magisters to feast on lies. The People accepted the feast, and from the darkness they devoured they birthed corruption.'

Fenris frowned. 'Too much.'

'But you know this already,' the harhen said. 'You do not need to remember, only to write.'

Small, curt motions of wrist and arm. Shoulder and hand. Fenris bit his lower lip in concentration, neck bowed. The barest sound, lips tracing the syllables.

When repetition erased meaning, only the words remained. Anders never knew the elves kept their own scripture. Not Dalish legend but the city elves, finding meaning in their circumstance, rewriting Andraste's message to make their own resolutions with their current suffering.

'No. Erase the page and start again.'

Fenris' temper rising sharp and sudden. 'I asked you not to treat me like a child, not to shame me with this treatise on why I should accept my place in the world as penance.'

'Stop, Leto. Sit. Every time, the same complaint.'

'Because all things have occurred before,' Fenris mocked, also as if by rote.

'Yes. Even your suffering is not unique. Clean the sand and begin again.'

Children, Anders wrote in the dust by his side.

And again, in Anderfelden. Children. Hunger. Feast. He did not know the character for magister. Strange shapes after so long; he knew them better in Arcanum.

The hunters brought in a Tevinter mage once. The healer called to tend, Anders tried speaking only for the caged and beaten Tevinter to laugh until she cried. After the mage was made Tranquil, Anders approached again and asked why she had laughed. Such a simple answer for a boy who learned language from books: such an appalling accent.

The page was erased twice. On the third error the harhen dismissed Fenris.

'Return when you are in a better temper. Without your audience, who is clearly disturbing you.'

Strange to watch Fenris' formal courtesy offered to the harhen, after spatting at the old man. But Fenris had always been conscious of the courtesies. Outside, Fenris said, 'How is your hangover?'

'Steadily peaking. How is your temper?'

'Tempering without fuel,' Fenris said, almost wryly.

'Time to eat yet?'

They ate with the Vhenadahl painters, steamed buns of a flour finer than Anders expected and water coloured to safety by a dash of wine. Anders sneezed every second bite.

The three elves found this increasingly humorous.

'It's the pollen,' the younger explained, arms and ears stained with enough paint he looked Qunari. 'The sex parts of the flower, you know?' But the grins kept spreading.

'I assume a rumour about the Vhenadahl causing sexual desire in those who sneeze?'

'Not exactly. Everyone knows a sneeze already means you're thinking about sex. The Vhenadahl pollen -- helps it along.'

Anders sneezed helplessly. 'Let's get away from here, Fenris. Before your tree impregnates me.'

With deliberate slowness, Fenris tested the wetness of fresh paint. 'Such a stubborn trunk. Monument instead of a tree. Climbing it would be like climbing a mountain.'

The workers fell over themselves laughing, tears in their eyes.

'--can't believe you said that! Climb the Vhenadahl!'

'Time to move on,' Fenris announced.

Anders noted, 'All haste when you're the one being laughed at. Never mind my humiliation.'

A fleeting grin.

At the square, Fenris went to collect his slender sword, leaving Anders outside. When voices spilled from the interior in unhappy Arcanum, Anders examined his boots intently.

'Did you drink last night--'

'--trust me with your life--now you will not trust--to drink?'

'--always trust you with me, cousin! But when it comes to you--no rest! --with the magister!'

'He is no magister.'

'--all night! I fear for you.'

'Enough!'

'Fenris, please do not shout at me.'

Shyly stubborn, a refusal to bend. Anders grinned at his boots. A diamond, Fenris called her.

The children ran two ball games in the square at cross purposes. The games parted around Fenris like a tide. This time, Fenris knocked on the orphanage door, a frustrated rhythm.

Anders asked, 'Who's Leto?'

The door opened.

Aleissa held a battered mace, wearing appropriated leathers. Fenris offered the slender sword across the palms of his hands.

'This will suit your size better. Today we will train with steel. Anders is a healer.'

Aleissa looked between them.

'Before you show off for me,' Anders said, 'have you forgotten my small problem.'

In the space at the end, he did not say, Leto. Because it was obvious.

Because it was obvious, Fenris did not look at him. 'Then we shall rely on my skill to keep us from harm. Do you trust me?'

Aleissa said without hesitation, 'With a blade, always.'

Fenris stiffened, and Anders felt immediate doubt, but Aleissa called the children to clear the square to their tutor waiting inside.

'Get back, mage.'

'What if I wanted to spar with you instead?'

'I will not ever set my blade against you.'

From the sidelines, Anders saw, with relief, that training was not fighting, where Fenris used the sword more as bludgeon than blade. Here he used slow precision, letting Aleissa recognise and react before his sword could touch. Aleissa too was not unpracticed, against him or a greatsword, slender blade in her right hand and dagger in her left.

If she struggled to hold, he did not force her to fall. Though there was an expression on Fenris' face Anders could not name but had seen before. This restraint cost him.

Faster. Fenris called his moves, less time for Aleissa to plan counter and attack.

When she faltered, Fenris pulled his blade from the arc with vicious motion, lip curling. Scathing, the way he turned his back. Aleissa's neck reddened, her hair was dark with wet, the impassive features brittle as porcelain.

With no warning Fenris stopped calling his moves, and Anders felt his unease turn to stone.

Desperately, Aleissa fell under a wild sweep, back hitting the dust. It should have been over, but her face contorted, she yelled, and bundled her small self under the length of the blade, shoving her dagger at Fenris' gut.

An easy arch, flesh sucked towards spine with that overwrought muscle, six, seven steps backwards, which Aleissa followed unrelenting with her bladed threat and bared teeth.

'Very good,' Fenris said. He relaxed, pressing fesh into the blade. Against the blade, which had turned to the flat.

Aleissa, panting and shuddering, finally nodded and dropped her hand.

The lyrium had not even flickered.

Magic clenched like a fist. Anders fought for control, clutching at a tail of thought Justice could not follow. Another thing he had never taught the spirit, that small hurts well learned could prevent larger ones. Justice understood prevention even less than shame. He existed only for the aftermath.

'You're a horrible teacher.'

Walking within range, Fenris had dust in his hair, peppered along the jaw.

'Yes. I do not teach. Aleissa might merely hope to learn.'

'Look, a good teacher caters to the capability of the student. If you go trying to force novices to fireballs, barns are bound to explode.'

'I am not a mage,' Aleissa spat, through the quaking lungs.

'It was a metaphor,' Anders said. 'Look at her, Fenris.'

Fenris looked at her.

Aleissa gasped, 'I don't need baby moves, shem.'

'Walk before running,' Anders suggested.

Fenris countered, 'Fight before crawling, or crawl for others forever.'

'Playing that sort of game with bare blades is mad.'

'This is how I was taught. I have yet to fall in battle.'

'Not everywhere is Tevinter.'

'Yet it was not Tevinter that broke me and never by the sword!' The whiteness around his mouth, strain feathering the skin at the corners of his eyes.

Aleissa stepped between them. 'I asked for no mercy, because I never expect it. By what right do you intercede?'

Anders said, 'No right.'

Fenris heaved his shoulders and walked away.

Anders followed, Aleissa too puffed to try. Or evidently she was used to Fenris turning lethal and moody at an eye's blink. A new route through the alienage this time, until the ocean was close, roaring.

Fenris gestured at the horizon, 'No one is here. If you need to go--'

A bloody great cliff, a deck over the sickening drop. The Tevinters who built the city had not afforded their slaves any easy escape, even by suicide. If this had been the escarpment, the eluvian had no chance.

In the shade of a rope pulley were buckets of water. Fenris removed his gloves, washed his hands, splashed dust from face and neck.

Anders waited.

'I lied. My lessons were never so easy.'

'Inflicted. I remember.'

Fenris sat on his heels, adjusting the slant of sword across his back to accommodate. 'You always remember what I say?'

'Such a memorable voice. How can I help it.'

'There is nothing else I can give Aleissa except the knowledge she lacks. She trusts me,' the hurt and rage unravelled, 'what little that means, when I have killed so many who claimed the same! I was trained as a weapon, and they expect me to--'

'How close are you to losing it when you fight?'

Except Fenris looked up, lyrium flaring the impossible challenge, 'How close are you, this moment?'

The words crackled, threat metallic and Fade surging at tongue and fingers. Anders pinched the bridge of his nose. 'Why does everyone. Have to push me. So. Far.'

'I wonder the same thing,' Fenris said, 'every day.'

The hint of humour, deprecating self and circumstance. Enough for Anders to laugh helplessly and lower his hand.

'Leto.'

'Just a name.'

'Can you show me again? I can't read elvhen.'

The leathers were stiff. Fenris stood to part vest from waistband, showing a slice of skin at the hip. His name was at the end of the list, narrow thumb underlining the ink. 'I will not forget it again.'

'How much else do you remember?'

'My father, my mother, an accountant and a hairdresser. My brother Jax scribed, and Ales was a weaver, tailor. Rhad and Danae were the twins, who worked harvest with me and would not settle to a trade. My sister Nia was a mage. Mock if you wish.' The leathers in place, head tossed in a mannerism which needed the old length of hair to make sense. 'Nia was to be our magister's apprentice and awarded citizenship on her majority.'

'Danarius would have--'

'No!' The fist bounced from thigh. 'He was later.'

Then Fenris spat with the wind.

There was an elf utilising the latrine end of the deck, eying them curiously. Anders inched closer to Fenris.

'I'm almost glad to hear you angry about him again.'

Because no one should say their tormentor's name with the softness Anders remembered from the Wounded Coast. Across the years Anders could remember the particular stink of sweat-filled silverite, gauntlets catching in his hair. He had learned his lesson by the time it came to Rylock, stopped playing his games.

'I cannot remember the first magister's name. Likely I never knew it, only domina, magister. Had Nia been accepted as apprentice, then my own sister would have ruled me along with the others. I resented her.'

'I'm so very sorry.'

Sharp and unforgiving. 'On Seheron, I nearly ran to the Qun. You cannot imagine the Empire, mage, where demons are called and harnessed to labour beside the slaves. Their brimstone and foul leavings are so customary there are roles and soaps made specifically to attend. The Qunari were the first to say this was not the way things should be. But I would have turned Nia over to the Qun out of spite, not belief. I remember.'

'I don't know. You've always had conviction, right or wrong.'

'You see something in me that is not there! The Qunari attacked. If we had run to the Qunari and embraced their faith -- but they would have collared Varania, and we did not, unanimously we could not--'

'Of course not,' Anders said, 'she was your sister.'

A pattern of theft and redemption so simple and elegant, repeated as many times as there were mages. Anders did not know whether to blame the yearning sentiment on Justice or his own pathetic solitude.

'We were brought to Minrathous to be sold. Tell me if any one sister was worth the loss of all.'

'Another moot point,' Anders said gently, 'because it happened as it happened, and now you are here.'

'Now I am here.'

Too much to stand apart. Anders touched the sloped shoulder. 'My mother fought for me too, and my brother. Such impact pots and shovels can have against silverite. Templars couldn't even punch my name out of her, nor my age or nameday. I would have been a different person if I hadn't seen her stand against them.'

'Now you are here,' Fenris said, 'abomination or apostate, without a name or a birthday.'

'Well. You at least have the name.'

The wind ripped and roared.

'So should I call you--'

'No.'

'Not even in private?'

The brow wrinkled. 'No.'

Anders said, because it was almost habit and for him even sentiment was sharp as knives, 'And how much it hurts, living where they can just take us, take our families, take our names. Not even an apology. Not even the acknowledgement that perhaps there might be another way. Our very names.'

'There is no us, mage. Not with this.'

'No one alone has ever brought about change.'

'What templars do to mages is not what an imperium does to slaves.'

The old fire wanted only for fuel. Tempting, to fall into old patterns. And what templars did to you, what they did to me? Is that any different, their assumption of their right to do what they will? Those verbal mazes were familiar, proofs demanded over diamondback and behind Hawke's back, friends leaving in frustration, meaning denied because of unspoken implication and in the end they had ignored each other with a particular brand of silence, those years and miles away from this uncertain terrain, where Fenris shared his blankets for no good reason Anders could name except the fragile memory of closeness.

Anders let his chin drop, and for once the silence spoke for him without hurt or provocation. He did not want Fenris' anger any more.

Deprived his target, Fenris subsided.

'So you were the youngest.'

An unwary, weary nod.

'That explains why you and Carver get on so well.'

The puzzled look again.

'You know what I mean. Eldest children try to take care of the rest. Middle children achieve immortality trying to kill ogres. Youngest children snipe and sulk trying to win the attention away from everyone else, generally by swinging the biggest swords.'

'Mage,' Fenris said, 'you are an idiot.'

'Only when it comes to making friends. When you wind up stuck with the same group of people for a lifetime, you learn not to try too hard. They'll always be there.'

An almost chuckle, as if Fenris was afraid of the sound.

If I could put out my hand, Anders thought, but he could not.

Already he could feel the moment sliding away into the approaching afternoon, as if every hour which passed would only increase their distance instead of closing it. But he was in a surprising place where it was the other's hand, for reasons never obvious, reached across the shadowed wall and grasped his wrist.

'Why are you always so warm,' Anders did not question. The pertinent query could not be asked.

The fingers laced through his own. 'There was either very little to learn about friendship in your circle. Else you learned very little.'

'You knew what I was, yet you never feared me.' If he used Fenris' words from before, wounded on the coast, Anders did not care. The hurt was the same.

'If I had been there, I would have bound you as tight as Hawke and the templar. If I had been in a magister's prison with a mad abomination.'

Anders heard his tone thicken, 'But Fenris. You would have done it without making me beg first.'

His throat filled and flexed in want of a tear.

'Fenris,' he gasped.

The hand almost crushed his.

'Every day,' Fenris said, 'I am terrified. You are no more terrifying than everything else.'

'You don't show it.'

'The fear? You have never known me different.'

'So how do you get through it? Charge in, teeth bared and sword ready?'

'No,' Fenris said, 'I wake up. The day passes. I sleep. I have learned everything passes this way. The worst of horrors or hurts. Minute by minute. It does not need my attention or defiance. If it is all I can do to choose to wake, then I will choose to wake--'

Fenris untangled their hands, then walked to the edge to relieve himself, the selfconscious set to his shoulders making Anders look away.

Because Anders had once been so cruel to push.

'There you are,' Fenris said, when he walked back with his shirt an untucked tail between dark vest and trousers, 'now you have the secret of my survival. Apathy has been all that saved my mind for this,' a brutal gesture encompassing the alienage, suggesting the surrounds to be no more than what they were. 'Some victory, however I try to reframe it, I survived all the templars made of me simply through forgetting to die.' In the word Fenris never used before today, bitter and longing, Anders' lifetime of defiance almost proudly within: 'Apostate. You would never so succumb to such forgetfulness.'

'Just like I never succumbed to Justice,' Anders said. 'To Hawke's house, his servants, his comfortable furniture, and the comfort of believing in him.'

Now Fenris looked uncomfortable, 'Not even I would deny you some comfort. No one deserves this sort of a life. Darktown is worse than misplaced faith.'

'You always were a hedonist,' cheerfully, 'if in denial.'

And Fenris did not deny it but with a smirk, which made Anders laugh without cruelty.

A kind of ease between them after that, fragile memories weaving firmer. The press of the lined palms, like the poreless skins of paper. Shoulder brushing shoulder. The arch of Fenris' neck when he looked to tuck in his shirt. It could almost be a pleasant thing, Anders thought, this sharing of time for no better purpose than sharing of time. If they could resist the pull of old history.

But because the afternoon could not be stretched wholly by a meandering silence, Anders asked, 'When you're not the elf I know, what do you do?'

Fenris thought for too long.

'I used to drink. Spend my days with Isabela. She and I would walk the docks and listen to the rumours, she for a ship or a captain weak enough to fall to her hand, or word of the-- relic, though I only suspected. I listened for word of Danarius. Or slavers. When I heard of the latter I would take Hawke, or Donnic and Aveline, or all three; there was joy in that fight.'

'You vigilante, you,' Anders said, idly.

'Apostate,' Fenris said, without malice.

What a graduation, Anders thought. Because that brand, apostate, from Fenris' lips made him feel warm and dashing and obscurely young again, the role he had chosen, where mage had always been as pointless and frustrating an appellation as human.

'Did you enjoy yourself?'

Fenris thought again and said, 'Enough to be tempted to do the same almost all the time. Isabela was warm company, without judgement. If prone to spontaneous embrace.'

There was a flush on Fenris' dark cheeks, eyes distant with grief. All the times they should have hugged her back. Anders touched Fenris' hand this time, fingers sliding along the shirtsleeve to the tense bicep, so fleeting.

'So,' lightly, 'no invitations to Hightown dinner parties, no alienage festivals, no rich food or smoking cigars, no attending the races?'

'Festivals,' Fenris said, and shook himself abruptly. 'The card tables were enough for me, on my own. I only gambled on the dogs when escort to Hawke. He might well have made his fortune there as on the Deep Roads.'

'Really? What a surprise. For a Fereldan.'

'Such sarcasm,' Fenris noted.

'Now, Hawke has the occasional dinner party. I assume he never brought you to those.'

'And you attend, I suppose?' The doubtful amusement, Fenris' eyebrows climbing. The live-in apostate nearly all of Kirkwall thought Hawke was bedding, where champion overwrote Hawke's own apostate status every time. Neither Anders or Hawke would argue with what society might believe; a shield of reputation was a frail one for them to be poking holes, when Anders' life and liberty hinged on rumour.

'Smart women with bare shoulders and wearing too many diamonds. Not my thing.'

'What is your thing, then?'

Anders said, 'Almost always men.' The breath caught and stuttered in the scarred throat. '-- not that there's been much of anything, lately. That part of my life is years gone.'

'I imagine your spirit has little interest in mortal pursuits.'

'No, I lost interest before that. It was never-- I was always grappling for some kind of closeness. Or power. Sex for some kind of purpose other than enjoying sex. I was in Denerim for a while, running wild ten years too late, that was where I met Isabela. Even that was just to prove something to myself, I would wake and feel revolted and free, and by the evening I was with another chasing it again. Times were I could look at Isabela and twist with envy, because for her it always seemed so easy. No, that's not right, not easy-- More, love intense and fleeting and without need for more than what she took and what she gave. Because I only ever took, and took, and wanted more--'

Then this long stretch of years, from Rylock's death in Amaranthine with his mistakes witnessed by the broken hero Tabris, where he chose flatness.

'Justice does not understand most emotion. I did not want to risk it, back when we were still separate and at the worst I could stare down his confusion and outrage and say no. Now I don't know what would happen.'

'The question has never arisen,' Fenris said, looking anywhere but at Anders.

'I thought about it with, uh. With Hawke. In that prison. The worst nights he would hold me so I could just sleep, and sometimes he would be hard. Not that it meant anything, I think Hawke could get hard at a brisk shake of the hand.'

'I know,' Fenris said, 'how Hawke is.'

'I thought, why not, we were probably due to die. Let there be a burst of comfort in the dark. Something to hang my sanity on. But it would have been a mistake, anyone would have done, even Carver. Not that there's anything wrong with Carver, but for the general maliciousness and templar nature... More using. More taking. It would not have been fair.'

'You are a romantic,' Fenris said.

'You say that as though it's worse than mage.'

'Let us go watch dogs racing and without the Fereldan,' Fenris said. 'We will spend the coin Hawke gave you so you might pretend you have paid your debt to me, and buy a booth of our own instead of the stalls, and drink Orlesian champagne.'

The improbable sentence rolled from Fenris' lips, no less voluptuous for the dry tone. Subtler variations of emotion than Anders was prepared to explore.

Clumsily, Anders said even though he knew the answer, 'Do you intend to, with Hawke, again--'

Almost anger on Fenris' face as he turned, hands loose and awkward by his side, then clenching until the leather groaned over knuckles.

The anger rolled away, leaving behind a tired, weak hurt, no trace shield.

Fenris said, 'Do not mock me by pretending you do not understand. You are the romantic.'

'I am the soul of shabbiness,' Anders said.

Fenris closed his eyes, forehead tight, but this time Anders did not know where to touch to release him.

'And champagne makes me giggle,' Anders mumbled.

The lashes lifted, thick as stars.

'There could be brandy instead,' Fenris suggested. 'Antivan.'

But they did not go to the Lowtown races for the afternoon, knees knocking on their seat in the booths with rippling banners of nobility far above them, Hawke's somewhere off to the left, and a tangled mess of mortality below them, and there was no brandy, because the sublimely responsible Orana had already hidden the coin Anders had painstakingly stacked.

'You would have hated it anyway,' Fenris said, after sloping sheepishly from of the shack to join Anders' perch on a nearby barrel, sitting back to back.

'I always feel like I'm in Darktown in a crowd,' Anders admitted over his shoulder. 'Armpits everywhere. I can't imagine today would be a good day for me to rejoin society, hung over and--'

Fenris waited until it was certain Anders would not finish.

'I enjoyed it. Hawke told me I enjoyed it too much. The half heard curses, the commentary on fourlegged form. How seriously I would take the gamble. I did not tell him there were slaves who won their fortune on a single best bet. To have bought my own papers would have been such a dream--'

Anders thought viciously to someone who had never answered, can't you let him even enjoy something as simple as a bet?

Fenris put shame to the thought, 'My brothers and I in Seheron, we would go to the docks and spend in a day on the cockfights, the dog fights, months of our pittance. When I was seven, I won and none of them did. They let me spend the coin where I would. On childish things, sugary things and-- books, toys. They could have just claimed the coin and spent it more wisely, but they let me-- And I did not even share one, except with Ales and Nia--'

'Are you all right?'

Fenris straightened his shoulders against Anders' spine, the shuddering gone as quick as it had come.

'I had forgotten that.' The brooding cracked off Fenris like a storm. In frustration, 'How is it that I am who I was, before Danarius took my memories? That I like the same things, that I feel the same anger for things that angered me before he touched me? Memories make us who we are, and if I had none then should I have been nothing but his.'

'You're asking me?'

'You are here,' and the imagined quirk of mouth hardly compensated for the tone.

'But people forget things all the time, and it doesn't change who they were when they still remembered. You have a horrible experience with someone putting spiders in your bed when you're a child. You panic and take fright, and hate spiders from then on. Years later you've forgotten the spiders in your bed, but you remember the fear, and you still hate spiders without knowing why. And Danarius-- could never really take your memories. Only block them, bar them behind that glyph, but the responses you had, that you would have, are always there. He might have done it to quell whatever rebellion he imagined, but it would never have worked forever. It didn't, did it. As soon as he was not there to maintain the barrier--'

'I do not hate spiders.'

'It was an example,' Anders said.

Fenris asked, flatly, 'How is it you know of the blood magic behind which a blood mage barred my memories, when I did not know until these last months?'

The glittering thing: unseen terminus of the lyrium web which bound Fenris as fleshly Fade portal, each pulse of his heart binding him tighter, like a veil tear bound threads of Fade to Thedas. The impossibly complex construction only seen when looked at through the right eyes, with the wrong knowledge. Anders should have denied him.

'I-- I'm a mage, of course I can--'

Fenris did not ask, 'You are a blood mage.'

Vengeance. The part of him which would not compromise to achieve what must be achieved: they had both been Grey Wardens, after all. And blood was simply an alternative power when Anders had already said yes to his personal demon, the resource which filled the spaces when lyrium was out of his reach.

Blame the other, blame the separate, unrestrained part which called shades on friends and called to Anders' fingers the knowledge of long dead maleficarum. But it had been Anders who read and studied the lore alongside childish dreams of Tevinter. Because he had never been allowed to have anything but words and defiance.

Look a demon in the eye, Tabris told him, with her own warrior's eyes; look it in the eye, Anders, say no to the bitch. And tell her: but I will take from you what you will not give. Because we are bitterly, bitterly selfish, because we must always do what we must.

Even when what must be done was done and the saviour left the saved, long ago and far behind.

Fenris would not balk to believe it of Justice. Anders' only crime would be his weakness. Fenris already knew his weakness. Embraced it, even, in his bed if not his arms.

'Yes,' Anders said, without turning.

The breath sped against his back.

'Yes,' Fenris said doubtfully, and sounded naked. He slid off the barrel.

Anders rocked between falling forward and turning, and sitting still forever.

'I have to escort Orana tonight,' Fenris said. By rote and without emphasis.

The shadows in the street promised a freezing night.

'Do you want me to--'

'No,' and, with an incomparable hurt, 'please.' After a hesitation, Fenris added, 'Later.'

Later when. Later tonight. Anders hugged the words to his chest. Fenris, I'm sorry. It would be inadequate, more cruel for the inadequacy. Anders stifled the urge before he could spill.

'All right,' he said, and waited until the unquiet pace was gone.

* * *

Orana let him have the bed without complaint. Fenris was careful not to disturb the buttons and whorls of coloured thread laid atop the fresh sheet.

He was a master of the unthinking doze. Afternoon bled into evening without interruption, until Orana set aside her sewing for lack of light. Fenris listened to her constant catch of breath in want of a word. In pity, he opened his eyes.

Immediately, she said, 'I am sorry I was upset with you. My fear is not your fault.'

He should never have assumed her confusion was meekness. Orana was too valuable for even the brute idiot Hadriana to kill, given a choice between the experienced slave and Orana.

Fenris reached out without thought, 'I had no true cause to shout at you.'

'I have a new secret.'

A slave's only currency, but Orana was not a slave and never grudged him hers. She tidied her trade, joined him, then made the covers into a cave over their heads.

'I hate my job,' Orana said, happily.

Fenris feared how often she touched him. If in Seheron he slept tangled more brothers to a bed than this, in Minrathous privacy meant Danarius, so Fenris claimed the company of others even when it was begrudged. Yet Orana assumed their strained kinship meant something Fenris could not decide as stupid and naive, or something else. Every time she touched him he thought he might break her, foul her. He could. And was ashamed this always occurred to him and never her.

Orana repeated, 'I have never hated a job before.'

Hate was too valuable to waste on the immutable, Fenris knew. 'Do you want to leave?'

A headshake, pointed ear tenting the sheet. 'I need more experience.' The backs of her hands pressed against the backs of his, smooth skin to leather.

'Might I ask. What did you do with my coin?'

Her face was a guilty child's, hands recoiling. 'Hid it.'

'I want it back.'

'What for?'

'Because it is mine.'

She reproached him, 'The mages here might not be magisters, but there are still some things for which reward is not wise! Do not--' In common, 'Don't do that for coin again, Fenris, promise me!'

Fenris looked at the rising blush, 'You think I would sell myself? In this bed we share? I would never shame you so.'

The familiar, secret spark of fire, 'But you would shame yourself? No!'

The space between them last night allowed Fenris to say, 'I won the coin over six years of his forfeit on cards. Because the mage has as little capability of hiding his thought as he does his magic, and he has never been able to bluff me, because I am not blind to what he is.'

Except what he was, was a blood mage.

'I'm not blind either,' Orana said, 'you should know.'

A lull, where he shuffled through unsuitable rebuttal, awkward. Orana crumbled first.

'Can I please keep some hidden? I thought, just in case we ever have to start again. I have savings too. They're together now.'

In the months since leaving Aleissa's wardship, Orana had built this around him and inexplicably trusted him not to tear it down 'A good idea,' he said.

They passed the time before her shift in the usual way. Rumour overheard at the Hanged Man. Orana's opinion of Varric's audience of drunks and gullible fools. Stilted enquiries into her latest romance with the red haired alienage lass. How well her reading went in Merrill's absence. The songs she wanted to perform at the next ubiquitous marriage celebration.

In return, Orana did not ask him which mercenary band it had been this time. Which of Donnic's patrols he shadowed, which Guard-Captain's less than legal scrip lured him to the law. Yet to see Aleissa's latest bruises or the grim mouth, at least Orana's usual reprimand for his absent restraint did not arise.

But eventually Orana left him for her bath in the orphanage dregs, and then he thought about Anders.

Anders looking awful, Anders being his too easily, too uneasily. Anders swinging from humour to fear from breath to breath as if high or delirious.

Fenris remembered Hawke's endless jaunts. The need to be ready, honed, could tatter the best to threads. Tiredness shoved to the side to accrue until the debt could be paid in a safer place. Fenris could have understood Anders falling to the exhaustion, even at his side.

Yet it had not been Anders who fell first but Fenris, with no excuse, as if he had been waiting to fall.

Have I been waiting, Fenris thought, dully. And for what.

Fenris remembered being without doubt. All mages were blood mages, only a line of lore away from treating life as fuel. Fenris could not say, the mage was tolerable because he used his magic to heal. Because Anders suddenly proved incapable. Could not say, the mage was bearable even as an abomination because he had control. Anders admitted he had no control. The mage was acceptable because he did not use blood magic. Until he told Fenris, I was always a blood mage, long before the demon.

Fenris could not draw his line in the sand. Because Anders crossed faster than Fenris could draw. Easier to accept than understand.

Fenris struggled, because his acceptance shamed him more than what any of them had done to him.

This, the anger which had Kirkwall's mercenaries turn him away as too high a risk. Never follows orders. Which had him beat a novice as though she could take his sword's edge as well as the flat. For this anger, Aleissa with her broken history decided he was a brother in pieces if not in arms. He accepted too much, the worst, because he found no other way to live with the crippling hurts except with a crutch.

Hatred has to be useful, Merrill told him. Or we wouldn't feel it so strongly. The question is only what we use it for. But hatred was no substitute for courage.

When it was night, Fenris left this safe place again, when he did not want to leave at all.

The walk to the Hanged Man was familiar, the populous dark of a deadly Kirkwall night. Orana stayed clear of his backswing; they had practiced together even without a greatsword. She still kept her dagger, and it still turned his stomach remembering the first time he ended the threat, only to find Orana holding her blade against her throat.

He knew why. If they had been taken on the streets of Minrathous without a master's glyph-- A lesson Leto learned the hard way.

'Do you still think of--'

Orana nodded, shook her head, then shrugged. 'At least it would just be for our money here?' The knuckles were white, fingers tight around the hilt. A flawed grip taught by Edwina and Norah, resisting Fenris' attempts to unteach.

Orana relaxed within sight of the Hanged Man, which was heated and noisy, another safe nest in Kirkwall's unforgiving stone. Fenris saw Orana to the kitchen entrance. Rather than settle in the alley to wait for his dinner, he went inside. 'I should see Varric.'

'He said you killed a dragon barehanded.'

Fenris offered the gloved palm with a smile which came without thought, 'I am never barehanded.'

The stairs were the same, the muttering drunks, the suspicious glares, though the latter came with a few wary glances after his attempts to find steady work with the swords here.

Varric was also the same, holding court in his regally decorated rooms with fingers steepled beneath the impressive chin.

'I have the Hawke version. Tell me what really happened in Corypheus' prison.'

'A desperate romance! Two apostates and a templar in a prison--'

'Tell me what happened to the mage.'

'There were two mages, you know. Unless you mean Malcolm.'

'Tell me what happened to Anders.'

Varric studied him thoughtfully. 'Backstabbing, screaming, despondency, horrible attempts to make hardtack edible, occasional quoting of Circle canon and Tevinter history. Lightning, lightning, everywhere.'

'Varric.'

The grin shocked Fenris with warm familiarity, unaware he had missed it. 'Two names out of you in one day, Broody. Time was once you would only ever say Hawke. Don't look at me like that, I'm setting the scene. Because what with all the backstabbing and so on, none of us really noticed what was happening to poor old Blondie. Or to his passenger.'

'Anders believes he summoned shades and used blood magic.'

'Until Carver smote him and put a sword through his gut.'

'But it was Justice,' Fenris heard the hesitance. 'Not Anders.'

'What I understand of possession, which is not much, Justice couldn't have done it unless Anders had the capacity. Think, Justice was no more than a warrior when inside that dead warrior of Blondie's old tales.'

'That does not answer my question.'

'That's because you haven't questioned anything.'

Varric led him as if words were a maze and the puzzle was the prize. Patiently Fenris said, 'Do you believe it was Justice who use the Tevinter lore, or Anders?'

'When it was Corypheus whose voice Anders was fighting?'

Both likely and horrifying. Twice possessed, twice filled, such a fragile vessel. 'You believe this ramble of ancient magisters.'

'You tell me.' Varric's face creased in sorrow. 'Blondie-- Look, something that old, I don't think the grand ghoulie was a thinking being the way we understand thought. He was surprised to be awake, which makes you wonder what he was saying in his sleep to all those Wardens. A dreaming motivation? Instinct without thought, seeking a vessel with the most power to come deeper and unlock the gate?'

'But Anders thinks Justice-- I do not understand how Anders could not know, if Corypheus moved him against you.'

'Does it matter? It happened, we survived--'

Fenris leaped into the breach. 'And Hawke believes the way to the Dark City could have been found through the eluvian.'

A considering look. 'You picked that up, did you?'

'Merrill said the eluvian was once used as a portal. There is a Chantry tale taught to us in Tevinter, claiming the elvhen opened the way for the Tevinter magisters.'

Varric waited.

Fenris fought to put reason behind his words, that they would not sound like myth and idiocy. 'Hawke thought he could follow magisters of old, and do...what?'

'Hawke,' Varric said, carefully, 'had a lot of whispered conversations with our friend the Fade spirit about the possibility.'

Fenris' skin crawled. 'Not possible.'

'That's what Justice said.' Varric did not quite laugh. 'Hawke's ever present attempts to recreate the world aside. How have you been? You look better.'

'I suppose I am.'

'I hear you're trying to find work.'

'Life is hard,' Fenris said, 'when everyone thinks I will turn on them. I would not, without cause.'

'Mercenaries shouldn't have causes.'

'And I am a poor mercenary.'

'Literally. Never mind. You could just have an especially bad ability to select the right clients. Listen, I might have a suitable job. Let me get my papers together, come back in the morning?'

In the common room Fenris sat and stared at his hands, scuffed the straw, trying not to think.

Hawke had always had an anger to match his own. The same necessary, protective blindness. As much as he always knew Hawke's ambitions, the way the man used his belief as a weapon, it had been anger against anger, the laughing foolish bitterness, which brought him to the man's bed. The need to stand alone which led him out of it.

To all that followed.

As if the two were linked. Fenris sneered.

The dining crowd peaked around him. Soon the numbers would taper, a lull before the drinkers arrived.

A templar propped by the door angled his head thoughtfully, staring at Fenris' shoulder.

Not his shoulder. The sword.

Fenris felt again the wall, his breath falling helplessly.

The templar crossed the room and indicated the bench beside Fenris.

'Might I join you?'

'No.'

The pale eyebrows raised.

'I am waiting. For a friend.'

'The friend who gave you that sword, I assume?'

They all had Alrik's voice, in a way. And that was Danarius' voice. Smooth, almost cheerful. Contemptuously assured of their place.

The ice subsumed him.

The templar sat into his silence, groaning silverite.

'An elf with a templar sword. You must have some very close friends within the order.'

Fenris could smell the man, the day of unwashed skin and underpadding holding rust.

'I'm looking for someone friendly enough to help me with my enquiries,' the templar said, resting his elbows on the table. Stroking the moustache idly.

Fenris could not even swallow.

'You see,' the templar said, 'I hear there's a certain specific friend to Templars around here these days. Quite happily distributing lyrium.'

Someone shouted a denial. With blood roaring in his ears, it took Fenris some moments to realise it was not him.

The common room continued unabated, knives rattling on plates, voices roaring, a distant storm. A second templar stood over their table, flushed and panting. Too sweaty for a ghost.

'Ser Keran! What are you-- Explain yourself!'

'Paxley, no! Not him, he wouldn't be--'

The cheeks, mottled, youth puffed with shame. The armour shining over soft flesh.

No impediment to Fenris' hand.

Kill him. Fenris wanted to. Except he was crippled.

'What's going on? Fenris?'

Orana clutched his dinner and more, one bowl in each hand, covers tied with bright green ribbons.

'Anything I can help with?'

Roguish instinct. Varric was at his side, thick strength and easy smile doing little to lift the threat in the eyes.

'Dwarf. If you insist on playing lawyer, be aware this is an enquiry and you will assist. You will all assist.' Paxley's voice thick and rising, standing. Keran at his back, gaze skating everywhere but at Fenris.

'Never said we wouldn't. But you might want to be a little careful with the questioning. A lot of sensitive souls.'

'In the Hanged Man,' Paxley said, incredulous.

The quaver, Fenris heard. The weakness within.

This was not Alrik.

Fenris stood.

And why was there a dwarf shoving to stand in front of him, an elf who smelled of chilli and cumin and meat wrapping her arms around his waist, whispering a name which was not his. Why this silence, in a place where he had always expected wary welcome, the unsheathed swords chill. Kitchen elves with daggers moving to stand in his periphery. Dwarves and scar-faced humans his shadows. The blonde human with the apron, wiping a glass to squeak grimly, hip to Varric's elbow.

'Extremely sensitive souls,' Varric said. 'You see.'

Paxley sputtered.

Keran said, 'A shipment of smuggled lyrium killed two of our senior officers. It came through the docks to here. We were sent to find evidence--'

'Shut up,' Paxley said.

'You won't find anything here,' Varric said smoothly.

Kirkwall's Hanged Men offered silence as affirmation. Paxley pointed. 'Your elf reeks of it. You expect me to believe he had nothing to do with this incursion into the Chantry's domain?'

'He didn't,' Keran said. 'Trust me.'

'Whose side are you on?'

'Listen to your friend,' Varric soothed. 'Go to the city guard if smuggling is your worry.'

'Not your place to tell me how to conduct Templar business.'

'Except everything seems to be Templar business these days.'

'Exactly,' Paxley said.

The silence filled with menace. 'Except templars have no business here,' Varric said, 'so it seems.'

'Nothing amiss here,' Keran said quickly. 'You're right, Messere Tethras. Thank you for your assistance with our enquiries. Paxley, move.'

'What is wrong with you--'

But Paxley did not resist when Keran steered him through the one path the crowd left open, to the door.

The ease of atmosphere did not establish itself again. The staff clustered around Corff, fearful glances at the door. At Fenris.

Varric sank into the space left on Fenris' bench. 'I'm too old for this. You want to pick up your sword?'

Except Fenris could not move.

'Fenris,' Orana said, 'your sword.' With both hands and knees braced, she levered the hilt from the floor.

He had fumbled the draw. 'Leave it,' Fenris said.

And was dignified from joining it on the floor only by the bench hitting his arse on the way down, folding without a spine, arms to knees and head to arms.

'You, uh.' Varric cleared his throat. 'Carver won't be happy if you leave his sword on the floor in here. It might catch something.'

'Take it. Keep it. With the armour which is in pieces. I do not deserve. Should not make believe as though I am--'

Hand clawing at the neckline of his leathers, pulling down hard, seams and flesh straining. Which would give first. He would be in pieces before he could weep.

'I wouldn't go ripping your clothes off in here,' Varric said gently. 'People might get the wrong idea.'

Fenris could not sob or laugh or sound, poor substitutes for screams.

'I have to go back to the kitchen.' Orana fluttered in the periphery. 'Fenris, will you eat? I brought the food. You might feel better--'

'Two bowls is a hearty appetite for an elf.'

'I thought...I was rude last night and this morning. I thought he might want to go visit his friend. Messere Anders, before--'

Varric shook his head in disbelief, 'Leave a city for six months, everything changes. Should have stayed away another year, come back to Viscount Aveline and First Enchanter Merrill.'

Orana chuckled. Fenris heaved, but had nothing to throw up.

'Hey, it wasn't that bad an idea. Carver could be the Knight Commander.'

Mouth full of spit. He spat. No one to notice. Not in the Hanged Man.

Where everyone knew.

No. Of course they did not know. Even Varric did not know. Only Fenris, and even that was too much knowing.

Ser Keran knew, with his shining silverite and sweaty nape.

Wetness burst on his skin, as if striving to flush memory from flesh. The cramping urge to toilet, as little care for control as an animal. He wanted so badly his body threatened to run home, run. Bar the door, never leave again. A prison of his own making.

Fenris lifted his head, snarled at the desire.

Two bowls steamed on the table, green bows slowly wilting atop. Every day Orana tied those bloody ribbons.

Every day, doing only what was in front of him. The ladder out of the hole. He was sick of the climb, only to always fall.

'I will go.'

Orana touched the back of his hand.

'She hates this job,' Fenris told Varric, distantly.

Orana yelped, 'That was my secret!'

Varric was kind, accepting the distraction. 'Even Corff hates this job. Did you mean that about the sword?'

The bowls stacked atop each other, hot even through his gloves.

'I do not know what I mean. But I cannot--'

'It'll be ready when you are,' Varric said.

Fenris walked into the night, spine as carefully straight as if he walked under the weight of a bath full of water, instead of two bowls of spicy stew. Instead of fleeing to his cage, he fled to a blood mage instead.

He still fled.

Stairs. The arches pointed at memories of home. Seheron and Minrathous and Qarinus and Kirkwall, oceans and continents apart but the architects were the same. Smooth cobbles replaced the dust at his heels. Chill air on his face, yet with the undertone of a summer coming, only discernible in Hightown. He had been taken in summer.

No. He could not stop, or he would not start again. He kept walking. The path was the same, always forward. Fenris went to the servants' entrance, by the kitchen, where he balanced bowls in one hand and fished the key from its hiding place with the other.

'Goodness,' Bodahn said, after dropping a large metal tray in surprise and making Sandal laugh with the first, less couth ejaculation, 'but by all means, if you think you might have luck making him eat, he's in his bedroom. He never says no to food. Never before, anyway--'

'Smells good,' Sandal picked at the few crumbs remaining on the table.

'Not Hawke,' Fenris said, desperately.

Bodahn looked nettled. 'I would be a poor servant if I couldn't tell which surprise caller was for who.'

'Whom,' Sandal corrected.

'Master Hawke left with his brother for Sundermount. After barely a nap and a change of clothes, mind you, and a letter to the banks confirming he's still alive.'

'Bodahn, what was that almighty crash? I hope it wasn't another--'

Call it summer, then, rolling into the room on the swing of the door. Anders blanked his expression, inexpert.

'No boom,' Sandal said. 'Sorry.'

'Not a problem,' Anders said.

And Anders stayed in the frame, breeches and cheap, thick linen shirt, six months of growth unbound over his shoulders in tangles, six months underground still living in the shadows under the hollow eyes.

'Orana told me to bring you dinner.' Fenris put the bowls on the table, one beside the other, and undid the ribbons.

'Right.' Anders scratched his shin, and confessed, bemused, 'Only I got the impression she didn't like me much.'

'Perhaps this is apology.'

'--I didn't think you would come.' On a single breath.

Perhaps this was power. 'Except I said I would.'

Later. Tonight.

'Yes, but--' Anders rubbed his eyes, muttered, 'Nothing smells that good in a dream.' Brightly, 'Shall we eat?'

Bodahn chivvied the hopeful Sandal from the room, said, 'There's some rutabaga in the pot, if you want,' and left them alone.

Anders decimated his stew. Fenris sat opposite and clung to the familiarity. The smells and evidence of life in the kitchen, boiled swede and the thick chopped chilli in the stew, herbs wilting on the windowsill at Anders' back and the starry sky beyond. Nothing of Tevinter in here, a late addition to the estate.

Nothing even of stone but the sand-scrubbed floor and hearth behind him radiating heat.

Fenris raised his spoon.

Anders said happily, 'If Corff is serving this up now, Bodahn needs to make the walk to Lowtown instead of just around the corner. Maybe Hawke should employ Orana.'

'Too much spice for the Fereldan tongue.'

'For some reason I never picked you as liking chilli.'

'Marchers eat blandly. Even without the need.'

The boiled swede went untouched. Eventually even Anders leaned back, wiping watering eyes, cheeks and throat flushed.

'Your, uh, stomach doesn't object?'

The mind objected more. Taste and texture another thing taken, reclaimed too fast. Fenris shook his head.

'Not even your throat--'

'I have done worse to myself than a bowl of chilli. While you were gone.'

The spoon was placed very carefully to the side.

'I am glad you are alive,' Fenris said, because he had not yet.

But Anders said, 'Fenris, what is this?'

'Dinner. Supper. Given the hour.'

'An evasion worthy of a rogue.'

'Eat your swede.'

A helpless laugh, 'I give in.'

The cupboard by the sink held wine, which Anders poured, two glasses held paired by the stems in a single hand.

'More water than wine in yours?'

A nod, because Fenris could not say no.

Anders kept chattering. 'I must have slept like the dead this afternoon. Even in Vigil's Keep the rotations never wore me down as much as Hawke's little endeavours.'

'The lack of forethought always bothered me the most. Hawke would never find strategy before the rush.'

'You always rushed in before him.'

'By need. It grated.'

A quizzical look. 'I never picked you as one for strategy. Only bluff.'

'My duty, mage, every evening memorising the magister's itinerary, scouting likely territory before the day. In what time he left me. Danarius did not like to fight or duel. He...was not a quick thinker, not quick to act. His strengths were elsewhere, experiments, controlled conditions. I knew the streets of Minrathous like all the words in a book. Ranked each threat by risk and name.'

'You sound as if you almost enjoyed it.'

Fenris looked at his hands, the creaking leather gloves.

'I suppose I found satisfaction in being good at something. All the ways of killing. Of avoiding death.'

'So it wasn't all ripping out hearts and pouring wine.'

Because this was conversation, Fenris only said, 'A party trick. Danarius' safety meant more than my pride.'

'You always call him by name.'

'I will not call him master.'

'You never call my name.'

'I have rarely had the need,' Fenris said, 'Anders.'

The mobile mouth stilled. Swallowed. Anders stood to clash the dishes together in a pile.

'Something I really miss about Vigil's Keep,' Anders said, slightly too fast over the self-made ruckus, 'Someone was always making music. I remembered that in the alienage last night. These things you never know you miss. Quiet as the grave in Hightown unless someone's making things go boom in the cellar. I hid in an alienage once, near twenty years ago now. Last night I felt as though I had come home.'

'You willingly endangered those with no capacity to defend themselves?'

Anders opened his mouth, paused. 'The family sheltering me knew I was an apostate. Not everyone lives ruled by fear.'

'You endanger everyone in whose presence you stay.'

'It is any different with you, fugitivus?'

'I avoided company,' Fenris said. 'Once.'

Anders grinned, not unpleasantly, as if at something dirty. 'Autonomy is no great prize, is it. The right to say no, you once called it. There is a value in being obliged to say yes. Don't look at me like that. You know I'm not talking about sex.'

Fenris bowed his head, 'I do not defend the alienage for the reason you strive to free mages. You have no obligation to other mages.'

'I have had a life they never have. I have seen the lives they never have. I cannot stand by when I witness how much less this world would compel them to accept, no more than you could let slavers sniff around your orphanage without moving to stop them.'

'That is not obligation. That is guilt.'

Anders turned as a seeking beast, 'I witness the injustice and I will act.'

'Anders,' Fenris said carefully, for the frisson at the name. 'That is still guilt.'

The sky faded from the mage's eyes, seams of Fade from his skin, defeat creasing in its place. 'The question being, whose. Sorry. We should not talk about this. Or you might feel obliged to be the one to guard me against myself.' Anders rubbed his eyes, more tired than bitter. 'Being the paragon of self control that you are.'

'I can barely control my bladder, much less my intent. If you wish, I vow I will never feel obliged for your actions.'

Something in his voice had Anders turn. 'I will never ask you to,' Anders said, sounding strange.

'Let this autonomy be its own curse,' Fenris accepted, almost giddy.

'I'm-- sorry, for telling you about the blood magic as I did,' Anders said, after a silence. 'If I had not been so tired, or just-- I regret causing you the distress.'

'Without regret for the blood magic you use.'

'No. I knew what I was doing. I would do it again.'

'I learned from your lips and not from another. Better than it could have been.'

'I don't know what it took for you not to kill me then and there.'

'It took nothing from me, mage. What have I to give?'

'And we're back to mage?'

'Anders.'

The wet dishcloth wrung into a rope, Anders watching the water dripping between his feet. Without spite turning each sentence into a sword, where were their shields? Fenris studied the windowsill of sagging herbs.

'We found the blood mage who had taken Leandra, Hawke and I. But it was not desperation moving me when I used his own lore against him. I chose. My own justice, with a sense of humour as grim as Aveline's. I killed him with his own hands. Then I wept for Leandra where Hawke never would.'

Because Fenris did not know how to touch sentiment without being burned, he said, 'Hawke did not know you were a blood mage. I remember he defended you against me, those days before.'

'He did take it worse than you did. I tried to comfort him after. Hypocrite was the least of what he called me. I tried dragging him back into the world. You know. Our fights and freedoms and not so secret undergrounds. He resisted. He is more himself now than then.'

'Your...spirit did not seek to rally him.'

'Justice does not rally. Justice comes along after the damage is done and punishes the cause with little thought for the effect. Storm the gates and let the casualties hang. The one time I try to take the initiative, to act. An innocent dies.'

Fenris wanted to reach for him. 'Innocents often die.'

'Innocents do not exist,' Anders said. 'No more than compromises.'

'On the latter I disagree.'

Anders raised his head. 'The civility is a welcome change.'

'Every day alive is a compromise.'

'Is that what is this,' Anders indicated the space between them, from sink to where Fenris stood by the stove, 'the middle ground?'

'By choice it would not be there.'

'Fenris--'

But it was too hard to walk across. Hate was not courage, and the closeness of the morning was now uncertain, the shadow of a Templar stretched between.

'I remember the days,' Fenris said, and hated his unsteadiness. 'Before. When the behaviour of all was more or less predictable. Even myself. Because it was my duty to know. That is, I like to think I remember, but now I suspect the only certainty is death.'

Anders crossed the space without concern, and took the hand which Fenris had by his side and could not reach forward.

'What do you want from this?'

'In all these months, I have never stopped to think.'

'That is dreadful. If also unsurprising.'

There could always be food and conversation, Fenris thought, if he stepped away now. But whether there would be more. Fenris said, uncertain, 'You are part of my being alive. Of my life. Even when all I had was hate, you shaped it. I do not hate you now, and so now I do not know.'

'You always seemed to be very fond of anything you do not hate.'

Because Fenris had never known the interstitial spaces.

'I am a selfish person, Fenris. I want the people around me to give. You never used to give even an inch. Barely room inside your statements to hook a question-- And if I am as bad,' Anders accepted the irritated growl, lips curling. 'As tight. Maybe that's our compromise.'

But Fenris already knew what the mage was, everything to be feared.

Anders let go of his hand to dim the gas lamps.

The last time Fenris walked up these stairs his disbelief drowned him. The smells and mobility and pride he was resigned to never knowing again. The weight of a collar only just removed still crimping his throat. These stairs, where he had fled from Hawke, fearing that one affirmation invalidated all his denials before.

Anders was a step behind. Fenris could feel the mage's urge to touch in the proximity. Fenris would deny him that. But he wondered. His skin was alive with longing.

Not Leandra's pale, empty room with its walls and the witness they bore to his shameful recovery. Carver's room, where Anders had taken the bed and filled the shelves with Chantry dogma. Fenris looked at the desk, holding only old ink and blank paper. The argument silenced without ears willing to hear. But the room was warm, almost too hot, coals in the open stove. The imprint of an unquiet body mussed the blankets across the bed.

Fenris lay on the bed stiffly.

But Anders dragged across an armchair and sat beside, casually, heels propped on the mattress.

'You could tell me a story,' Anders slumped, hands folded over his belly.

'I could?'

Warm light glittered in the half lidded eyes. 'All these things I've never seen, will never know. You've been more places than I ever will.'

'But what do you want to hear?'

Anders thought. 'Tell me about fish.'

'Because I hate them.'

'Exactly.'

Fenris wanted to laugh.

Abruptly, the opposite. They had not all sold on the block in Minrathous.

Ajax sold, then the twins, the former for his skills and the latter for their bodies. Their mother was old, Varania still bleeding after the slavers had done with her, both discarded as worthless. Leto had pulled four of his own back teeth with the dagger the slavers never knew he had on that long, horrific portage, hearing that they would not sell a male except whole, hale. The knife had been taken by the slave chained to his left, who had watched the mutilation with unseeing eyes, who had just as calmly slit her own throat before the slavers realised.

Left to the streets of Minrathous as unworthy of the time and food necessary to sell them.

After midnight, the lanterns went out. The streets ripe for harvest. The desperate refugees and the worthless, neither slaves or citizens. Just resource, free for magisters to collect and bleed with as little care as plucking the leaves of a herb growing through the pavement.

Freedom in Minrathous.

The second day their mother begged for work. The fifth, she sold their hair. The sixteenth, she almost sold their blood. They slept in the day and never stopped moving at night. Varania and Leto begged for crumbs to bait pigeons into traps, and if the traps failed they ate crumbs instead of pigeons. After sixty days, their mother found work gutting fish. Ten hours a day earned a meal and a place to sleep within a guarded, gated compound. An extra four hours earned a place for Varania at her side, four atop that for Leto to come inside. If they wanted food, they had to work. Slavery without contract, because the city made them desperate.

Leto spent his nights retching at the stench of his remaining family, revolting in shame.

Jax was in Qarinus, Leto learned. Too far to run. But Rhad and Danae were in Minrathous. The brothel master was away for long weeks, the best weeks, when the workers relaxed and his brothers kept company in the sun.

Rhad smuggled him food for their mother and sister. 'You never bring them here, stringbean, understand?'

Danae said little. Makeup smudged across his face like a bruise, hair worn in complicated girl's styles over shoulders clad in enviable silk, who wore a collar with jewelled patterns matched by the sparkling cuff at Rhad's wrist.

The benign welcome of other brothel slaves occasionally turned snide, 'Looking to add a third to the act?'

Rhad waved it off; it was Danae who snarled like a stuck cat with the eyes wet as jewels, 'You even think about touching Leto, brother, I cut your fucking dick off too.'

Ajax wrote once from Qarinus, with his address and a promise for more. The year grew long, the letters never came, Leto's voice deepened, and Rhad's hard eye turned appraising.

Danae warned Leto away.

'Don't come here any more. Stay with mother. Stay with Nia. There's worse shames than a stink. Stay away.'

But they were his brothers, and when the compound horror and monotony made him scream, and the streets were too terrifying, he climbed to their balcony.

Saw through the window what had been done to his brother. Done to the other. Danae crumbling into the shame of the painted face.

'Stay away,' Rhad roared, raging and bruised, 'or they'll have you kneel next to him!'

Leto found his place beside his mother and Nia, with countless silvery corpses pouring through slits in the wall, workers sorting, slitting, gutting, washing, scaling, chopping, scraping fish shit out of fish guts. Until the unexpected day a desperate elf, who had gambled away the coin provided by his master to buy trained slaves, made an offer to buy the three of them, and the human who ran the fish gut palace took his coin and forged a contract which said she owned them, and Leto and his sister and mother said nothing at all.

His second master was the manager of a street of townhouses, owned by a magister whose name Leto never knew. Leto was led to a storeroom housing two elf youths and a human boy. 'You can see your sister and mother every three days,' the master told him, and that was the last Leto saw his sister for a year, and his mother ever.

Barely seconds after the master left, someone shouted a name, and Temmin took him to attend the countless errands they lived to complete for the street of twenty families, buying food, washing clothes, finding shoes, scrubbing floors, sweeping verandas, hauling water, feeding the cats. No porridge or lotus root breakfasts, only biscuit; sometimes the master said there was no food, sorry. Leto and Rael went to market to sell the sparkling brew and apricot preserves that two of the families put together. The worst days they wasted carrying the masters to market in litters for them to browse and shop, standing idle all day, still with the workload waiting for them on their return and no sleep, never enough sleep.

Leto remembered the flutter of a bird's heart, the taste of fresh blood and raw meat, catching and killing pigeons. Wondering if it had been better, starving to death that way.

The Archon's namesday was one of the two work free days in the year. Leto stole a cask of wine from drunk Tevinters. The four slave boys shared equal portions, then Leto shared his mouth between Rael and Temmin and lay with his thighs tight for them to rub themselves between, while the human spread his knees and jacked himself with his eyes holding Leto's eyes, crying out. The Day of the Divine, they used to wash their clothes and pallets for a change, sleeping naked and together for comfort on the tile while the wet things dripped dry. Five teenaged sons of the free Tevinters walked in, locking the door behind them.

'That one,' a white hand pointed at the human. 'You, come over here. Bend down.'

The human struggled. All five Tevinters took their turn while the elves crouched in the corner, hands over their nakedness. The human's name was Erik. When the four slaves worked at laundry, Erik would fit his whole body into one leg of the fattest Tevinter's underwear, would make Leto climb in beside him and lurch around. Would wear the delicate silks of the daughters and tweak his nipples high with wet soapy fingers, asking them how pretty he was in mincing mimicry. Making them laugh until they cried.

The Tevinters were done inside him in a few minutes, even though there were five. Children. They were children, younger even that Erik, younger than Leto. Erik's breathing was too short and broken to let him cry. Temmin held his hand, and Leto wiped him dry and helped him put on his breeches without standing. Rael still faced the corner, hitting his head against the wall, again and again, until Leto put his hand between and felt the blood.

Leto found his sister accidentally on an errand, only six houses down the street. Varania was bored and angry.

'Sometimes I think I could take this whole place down. A fire in the fibres, so simple. In my dreams I think--'

'You say no.'

'My dreams, not demon dreams! If I had power enough to interest a demon I would not be here! Oh, please, you can't tell them about me. They will make me Tranquil in the Circle, and what then, but more of this endless labour and no possibility for these moments,' the fierce eyes they shared, fierce fingers, 'Leto, a human comes with the threads and takes the bales. I swear she wears the mark of the Qun on her arm. I saw when she came in for a drink, and the pump splashed her sleeve and it showed through the wetness. She must be a rebel. Talk to her. She could get you away. You could get strong and come back for us. I want to go home!'

The human woman was a Qun scout and agent. Leto intrigued her by quoting the Qun, enough to meet the next in the hierarchy, then the next, next, until he knew the small heart of Qunari agents working Minrathous. If Leto earned the casual backhand delivered by the master, the rations withheld for taking the chance to drop his mop and speak to her, in his starvation he hallucinated running away, claiming his own house, where he would never break his back to clean anything, ever.

The Qun agents asked for his commitment. Leto passed missives when in market, collected messages with a day's worth of fruit, planted notes by the well where he hauled water before dawn, terrified of being caught. They were using him. They had no intentions of smuggling him to freedom when his slavery served their intelligence better. Resentment grew thorns. To give them anything of himself was hard, these wary folk who spoke a corrupted Qun in this corrupted city as they learned the chinks in Minrathous' armour for the true Qunari, who could remain unsullied by the actions of spies.

They did not know Leto could read. Correspondence gave the locations of magisters called to the front. The Qunari set up a pre emptive strike to occur. One address was where Leto lived.

He was committed. Leto took drugged wine to the young free men -- boys, rapists, boys -- and slit their sleeping throats with the broken bottle, then waited for the explosions which would close off the ends of the street, the arrival of the Qunari suicide squad.

The slaves fled or hid in the massacre. Leto lifted a blade and joined the killing. He found Varania, and she laughed and wiped the blood on his face and screamed and cried, and in guarding his back in the chaos she set a fire to a magister when the mage raised his hand.

When the Qunari were nearly all dead, the Tevinter city guard pulled them apart, his last, and Varania called him brother until silenced.

Tevinter's inquisitors did not bother to promise him a short life of incredible torment.

Only a day they held him. Not so deep below the ground. A magister prowled the prisons in search of flesh for an experiment. He stopped outside the dog cage, crouched to look at Leto closely, head tilted, puzzled.

'I know you from somewhere.'

From the observatory of his Minrathous townhouse.

Where Danarius had watched curiously as a too tall elf used dry stale crusts to bait pigeons on a neighbouring rooftop, using his blood to soften the bread to lure the pigeons faster. Demonstrated speed and decisiveness, catching the birds barehanded when baiting failed. Danarius watched him drinking bird blood like a savage, those early days when he was so hungry, finding this way he could eat and still save the flesh for his mother and sister, while his own flesh thinned and stretched, pulse beating with stolen blood.

'How far do you think pride stretches on a rack, little wolf?'

It would be a show in the Tevinter style, if he failed the end cleaner than death by torture. If Leto won, a cash pot prize. Enough to buy his mother and sister. Because the Archon liked a good performance.

'You, of course, will be mine. But the honour will be yours. Honour is no small thing.'

And the clean silken magister bowed deeply to the beaten elf caged and collared like a dog.

The arena opened to a sky uncluttered by towers, a clean blue Leto had not seen since Seheron. Swords and braided ancestral banners hung on dark walls, a descant of gold and silver for the Archon's path, brown faces watching, the same nameless expression.

Pain was everything, but everything was nothing. Each time Leto fell he stood again. That was all. Success was not skill, only his refusal to die. The daggers he did not know how to use just a sharp end to the punches he did know how to throw. Kneeling at the end, holding his entrails inside with one hand and thinking of fish guts, and hating.

'There's a certain charm to persistence,' Danarius noted, 'I just knew it would be you.'

Sensing extinction, Leto remembered everything.

Sunlight curving over grapes. Ink on buttersoft skin. Red hair and deep voices and armwrestling one twin to each arm; he had always been the strongest of them, fighting his way up from the bottom of the heap. His mother's perfume. Harvest. Rain, a hundred thousand bodies silver and stinking. A universe of dust alive in a shaft of sunlight touching tired lovers. The smiles vomiting darkness from the throats of Tevinter rapists. Fire. Pain. Never. Ending.

Leto took it. Pain. Put it inside a box in his mind. Let Danarius take the key. Take it away. There was bliss.

But the world was in the warmth of this hand in his, the fingers stroking the wrist.

'Fenris?'

This face with earnest eyes. Anders knelt between his feet, where Fenris sat on the bed's edge with his legs apart, as if about to rise to a purpose eluding him.

'Does this happen often?'

He nodded. His face felt starched, wet.

'Oh. Is it always so bad?'

'Yes.'

His joints hurt as though frozen, popping and crying.

'I am sorry,' Fenris said.

'Not your fault,' Anders said. 'You didn't ask for this.'

But he had.

'Nor did you,' Fenris said. 'I should go.'

'I beg to differ.'

His face creased like a page. 'You cannot hold me here.'

'It's night, you have no sword, and you look like you ran off an escarpment you knew was there. Plenty of beds here. I'll make tea--'

Because it was easier than speech, Fenris refused to let the hand go even as Anders rose. Anders looked along their arms, but was not puzzled. Subsided to sit, bed bowing under their paired weight.

'Then I'll stay, I suppose.'

'Give me your mouth,' Fenris said.

'This isn't wise,' Anders tried. 'Right now.'

'I have never been wise.' If Fenris had hoped, it was for the silence to offer as much protection from memory as from feeling.

Then the mouth opened.

But if the eagerness was distanced by fear, that distance dwindled in the breath damply stroking him, the hungering heartbeat. If Fenris had hoped, it was an unfamiliar habit and made him yearn.

'I wonder,' Anders moaned into his mouth. The hand hesitated in the periphery, then curled under Fenris' ear, stroked his hair. 'It is like velvet.'

The gentleness exposed the considerable lack of such echoing in Fenris' skull.

The lips had all the meaning the words never did. Fenris trusted the lips. Launched out of dark indecision into that mouth. He put his hands on Anders' heaving shoulders.

'Lie back.'

The position, on his hands and knees, even though he was over the mage's body and not the other way around, had fear clench his shoulders tight. Fenris turned on his side beside this willing body and stroked the cheek. Placed his hand against the smooth throat, pulse fluttering against his palm.

'You shaved for me. In expectation that I would come.'

The brows crawled in embarrassment. 'I shaved. Specifically for you is arguable.'

Silence, as Fenris touched the face and hair, fingers shaping unbound gold across the pillow. 'Anders.'

'Still present.'

'Anders.'

'Now this is getting childish.'

'Anders.'

Because that smooth cheek was a detail Fenris never imagined, he returned his fingers there. The mage shaving. For him. Fenris touched the mouth with fingers, and Anders responded instantly, in quite a distinct way.

'I thought about you a lot,' Anders croaked. 'These last months. Not all pure.'

'I have not been pure for decades.'

'I took that for granted. What with the mercenaries we used to watch you move through. Isabela kept a tally. You like it standing up.'

'Sometimes. Sometimes I would like to gag you.'

The eyes widened in alarm.

'So you will have to shout everything, and think twice about what you say.'

'You're growling at me,' Anders almost wept, 'and I want you to do it again. Come on. Growl at me, Fenris.'

Fenris moved his hand past the mouth, across the throat. Lower, finger finding the way to the knots at the waist.

'Dear Maker,' Anders cried, 'You can't be drunk. Oh, stop! You might not like what you find down there.'

'An abomination?'

Anders struggled. 'You're laughing at me. I can't. You touch me. Like this. You kiss me. I have responses!'

'Should you not respond?'

'Do you want response? Or just someone to touch. Safely. I can be what you need, on your terms. But tell me your terms. Because after what they did to you, you can't want--'

Fenris let the anger curl his words beyond a growl. 'Tell me again how you know what I want.'

Without fear, the emotion flooded Anders' voice with longing, 'I don't know. I want to know. Right now I want you to keep touching me. But I do not want you-- going into a place I cannot reach with such fear in your eyes, what would I do then? You were crying, Fenris.'

'Stay. Wait. Do not leave me.' The shame at having to ask. Not so shameful as expected. 'Do not let me run away,' Fenris pleaded.

Anders softened unforgivably. 'I wanted to say. The sex doesn't have to matter.'

The words had hands with fingers poking every bruise.

'It matters to me!' Fenris said.

In bitterness, Fenris fought to free his hands until he realised what Anders was trying to get him to do. The laces of the ugly shapeless shirt went, elbows forgiving as Fenris stripped the shirt awkwardly. Urgency ripped threads from the unbound blonde. Fenris paused at the trousers, as if to consider the ethics.

Anders moved his hands over his head and gripped the pillow.

Then Fenris pushed his fingers past the belt until his palm was flat against the soft skin below, and bent his head, and felt unaccountably exposed because he would never be able to bend so far that Anders could not see that he was less than pure, less than impure.

'Why did I bother to come--'

'Keep going,' Anders said. 'I won't touch you. Your pace, Fenris.'

'Is this contempt.'

'Of course not.'

'Touch me now,' Fenris ordered.

The muscles in the arms shifted as Anders clenched his fists.

'I will make you,' Fenris growled, because Anders had asked him to.

The mouth went petulant, wanting to be bitten.

The belt unravelled into the darkness surrounding the bed. Fenris breathed a path through the unanticipated fur, dusty over the breastbone and under the arms, threads of gold in the startling thick burst at the groin, dark and sparse over the thighs. Details of texture that dreams never supplied.

Fenris took the mouth until the lips opened to him again, pressed his cheek against the shaved jaw, rubbed with the bridge of his nose. Silently Fenris told the collarbone, the pulse flicking below, no pity. Or I will break.

He could not quite touch the erection, ghosting over the skin, flush following his palm. Fenris remembered yearning for this. Anders warred visibly against the instinct to move, thrust, to make demands of his hand. Fenris wanted to claim him harsh enough the heat would bridge across the deep emotion, which could not exist and let him exist also.

The nipple rose hard and willing even before he touched. Heat flushed from heart to fingertips until his hands felt afire. Nipple to nipple. The skin tightened and blushed. Anders arched his neck, mouthed a silent curse at the headboard. Fenris put his mouth to the left, watched Anders watching him with eyes increasingly hazed, and let his tongue and teeth show before he lapped.

When he did bite, the breath that shuddered out of Anders was a stifled yell.

Fenris could imagine a time when he would think, remember a time when I was so afraid I could not touch you, and because he could imagine that time he did not have to wait for it to come.

The hard curve wept against his palm, beading slick against his moving grip.

The matching urge to come erect, battering his insides. Could not be claimed when awake, was not possible without hurt, shame. His pulse racing, thoughts afire, burning bridges. He wanted it. The willing wetness, velvet skin and hard blood, sliding foreskin, desperate pulse. His mouth watered.  
In envy or want.

Fenris bent his head regardless, mouth opening.

Anders shoved him away by the shoulders.

Then they both stopped, staring at each other.

The mage's fingers curled into his hair. High and desperate. 'I'm so sorry--'

'I want this.'

'Oh, I want, too, believe me. Your bloody beautiful mouth.' Almost a sob. 'Next time. I'm too...I'll come. I can't. Please, just a little--'

Anders embraced him, as harshly as he had shoved him away, wrapping tight with arms and ankles, twisting until they slotted together, narrow to broad, Anders thrusting against the cage of Fenris' hips, one hand cupped behind Fenris' head, eyes beseeching, until Fenris thrust back uncertainly, once, twice; he had never done it like this before, face to face and limbs laced together, with nothing more than grinding pressure.

Anders gasped and caught. The hands went tight, nape and waist, Fenris arched into Anders' hips and told him to let it come.

'Let me hold you,' Anders said after, and Fenris let the stroking and rocking happen, the fingers weaving through his hair, warm widening circles across his lower back, the leathers he had not removed between their skins.

Their breathing was ragged for too long.

Until Fenris wondered, what right he had to gasp like a dying fish so without release as his reason, and realised he could not stop those ragged breaths racking him like blows at all, and for some reason Anders did not let him go, because he had asked him not to, perhaps.

* * *

In the half-lit room, Anders examined the profile, dark lashes spiked with wet. He was rueful and embarrassed and humiliated, on whose behalf he did not know.

Fenris did not sleep, he fainted. Anders recognised the suddenness of the fall now he had seen it more than once, this yawning collapse. An escape from too much. But it was something which became another thing, Fenris' breath slowly smoothing past the sorrow. Anders was not untouched, never untouched by the proximity. The surrendered details, large pores on Fenris' cheek with ingrained dirt, fine hairs dusting from brow to hairline along jaw, the thickening above the lip that on a human, would have been a moustache. This beautifully sanctimonious mouth.

Fenris kissed seriously, as if it mattered. The lyrium formed two threads in the lower lip, inside his mouth, mirroring the marks on the chin.

Anders slept beneath him, woke cramping beneath the weight he did not dislodge. The discomfort was a penance. Slept and woke again. The lanterns died of their own accord, dawn eventually taking their place.

Anders did not think of much at all.

He stroked the velvet crop, silver warm against his palm. In the direction of growth, soft as satin. Against, he could feel the bare patches where lyrium scarred the scalp too deeply.

Fenris' breathing changed. His fingers scraped at sheets. A swallow. The lids creased unhappily, tight against the promise of wakening.

'It's still me,' Anders said, just in case.

He did not want to die.

Fenris mumbled something, pushed his face into the pillow until it was subsumed, long ear folding in half against Anders' cheek. A brisk headshake to free it.

Fenris rolled, Anders braced for the pull where they stuck together, his delicate flesh to Fenris' leather, could not stop his wince. Fluid, Fenris touched his feet to the floor, hand moving to push aside from his eyes a fall of hair that was not there. He looked at the flaking semen over his crotch and belly, blank and uncomprehending.

Anders staggered once on his feet. His trousers had never made it past his knees, easily returned to his hips, but he could not find his shirt. Jug and bowl first, chill water to a cloth. Scrubbed the come off his own belly, wrung out the cloth and turned to Fenris, who leaned back slightly, watching carefully, allowing Anders to wipe the flaking remnant off warm leather.

Anders was careful, as if he washed a wound.

'Last night.' A fall of gravel this early. Ash and coal and warmth inside that mouth. The words would never be the same.

'Whatever you want it to be,' Anders gave one last wipe. 'Look. All gone.'

Fenris met Anders' eyes fleetingly, then he touched with one bent finger the imprint of his leather crease and stud striping Anders' skin. Hesitated, then hooked his finger into the waistband. Tugged.

'Anders. Take it off.'

But what to say? Even surrendering his shirt had sped his heart to fear. Anders touched Fenris' hair, and was surprised when Fenris leaned into his hand and closed his eyes, a soft sound in his throat.

'Bodahn doesn't appreciate the naked dash to the privy. He has a hard enough time convincing Sandal spontaneous nudity isn't acceptable. If Hawke or I started doing it...not a good idea.'

Fenris blushed into his palm and opened his eyes. A brief, boyish cheekiness in the quirk of lips, then suddenly downcast. Anders wanted to nudge the chin high, and did not know if the action would be patronising.

They walked down together, Anders shivering into his coat, the seams thick and unpleasant against bare skin. He used the privy in the courtyard, then when Fenris slunk to the same purpose, Anders went into the kitchen to composite bread, only a little stale, a plate of oil and salt and vinegar, thick cut cheese and pickle, slices of salted meat. Unwilling to wait for the kettle on the stove, he heated water for tea with magic.

His skin prickled powerfully, the burnt taste in his mouth sharp and overwhelming, as if he had mistaken a coal for an apple.

Fenris stood in the doorway, the lyrium glow fading at the edges. One bare hand chaffed the opposite arm. His hands, clawed solid with scars.

'Sorry,' almost simultaneously.

As if either of them could change.

Fenris hesitated, shook his head. He collected the steaming cups. Anders carried the loaded plate. His stomach roared halfway up the stairs, and Fenris laughed, mocking. Stopped himself too soon.

In the bedroom, Fenris stripped his armour, a hunch to the neck that looked defensive even if his motions were steady. He wore long breeches and a shirt beneath the leathers, excessive garments which held Anders' attention for too long.

They sat with legs under the quilt, crumbs building between. They were almost finished with breakfast before Fenris said, 'Do I still owe you a story for last night?'

'It's not exactly bedtime now.'

A raised eyebrow. 'Did you intend for me to put you to sleep last night?'

Fenris slurped his tea, Anders noticed. Loudly and without realising. 'Intend is probably too strong a word.'

'You look tired.' Another slurp, Fenris's eyes on nothing. 'I dislike fish because when I was a child, I worked for some time in a...this word, in common. An abattoir for fish, for salting, drying, pickling it.'

Fenris' knees tented the covers. Anders watched the fingers ripple along the cup.

'Isabela would have known.'

A snort through the steam. 'Isabela is not a fisherman any more than you are a--'

'Blood mage,' Anders supplied. 'Abomination. Idiot. Fool. Mage.'

The silence was optimistic.

Fenris took the last piece of ragged cut bread and ripped it apart. He rolled crumbs of cheese into the dough between finger and thumb. He did not eat crusts, and of the other he ate too quickly, never quite clearing his mouth before adding more. His cheek bulged.

Could he taste anything, through the lyrium?

'Justice,' Anders said, because he did not know how to start, or if he would end.

Fenris' fingers stilled, his swallow loud.

'Justice wasn't a demon, when I took him in. Do you believe me?'

'I believe you believe it.' Fenris drank from an empty teacup, then frowned. 'Which is more than I wanted to believe of you.'

Anders felt giddy. 'Thank you.'

'Does it matter,' Fenris did not ask.

'It does. I'm afraid, of him, or of this world. Like as afraid as you are, every day. Impending doom cramping around my chest like an ill-fitting corset. You know what it's like.'

'If you intend to comfort me with the admission of your fear, it will not work. A fearful mage is as likely to succumb as the proud or strong.'

'Again,' Anders said, 'with this belief in my intent. I'm horrible with plots. I just...react.'

Fenris looked up. Those eyes. 'Why did you do it? Give yourself to the demon.' Reluctantly. 'Spirit.'

'Why does anyone? I was afraid.'

'It worked out well for you, I see, chasing away your fears.'

'I was afraid of what I could become, if I hadn't...the Wardens gave me freedom for being what I was. For what I was capable of, even as a blood mage. But after Tabris left, I became afraid. Of being caught, of what I would do if caught. And when the question came from Justice, I thought, if Justice was within me, it could be something which served us both. Justice could survive, and I would never be taken by any demon if Justice already had me. I trusted him, see. I trusted his intent more than my own. If Justice thought it was a good idea, then who was I to argue?'

A different taste in his mouth, metal and meat. But that was just a memory, a massacre he could barely acknowledge committing.

'Blood mage,' Fenris said. 'Abomination. Anders. Are you not afraid now, with your demon of justice instead of pride?'

'I am a paragon of bravery,' Anders said loftily. 'I'm in bed with you.'

Fenris reached across Anders to set the cup on the sideboard, plate sliding across his lap.

'And I am in bed with a terrified, possessed mage who cannot define his intentions.'

Anders considered the inclination of the body across him, the tone. A strange thought, that a Fenris who slept well and fed well could be frisky.

The plate followed the cup, leaving only a spill of crumbs across their laps, most of which Fenris had made.

'Magisters do not admit fear,' Fenris said.

'I'm not rich enough to be a magister.'

They took their time kissing. Fenris seemed to like it more than anything from the enthusiasm. The careful look in his eyes when he opened them, faces close. Hawke might well be the only one who knew how Fenris looked when angling in like this, who had cared for the warm lips and rough cheeks, the lyrium burn in the lower lip. A nice thing to share.

'If I were a magister, I suppose I should clarify my intentions about now?'

'No need,' Fenris said, seriously. 'No magister would care. Only the orders. Bend here. Kneel there.'

Such guilty want. Anders mimicked the cadence. 'Sit on my lap. Kiss me again. More tongue.'

'You intend to provoke me?'

'I think so.'

'Does it excite you, the thought of me being provoked?'

'I asked for more tongue,' Anders said instead, 'not more lip.'

Fenris hurled the covers across the room. Anders fought free of his trousers before Fenris could rip them and went for Fenris' ugly undergarments in the aftermath, fingers finding the skin beneath the ties.

'No--' involuntary, a gasp an octave too high.

'Please,' Anders said. 'Don't leave me like this.'

His desperation was pitiful, and Anders choked back more. Feeling exposed when Fenris moved away. His erection persisted with the shame.

'No,' Fenris said shakily, 'No begging. Just ask, and I-- Don't beg.'

'Don't make me beg.'

'I am not making you do anything!'

'Well, I don't like being the only naked person in the room!'

The expression crumpled. 'Does that happen often.'

'Enough for me to know I don't like it.'

Fenris' throat thickened, a silent, deep breath. The shirt went easily. The undergarments unlaced, thrust to the ankles like a challenge. Then it was as if a switch had triggered. Impassive as a wall, Fenris cupped his crotch and waited, a soldier's easy stance.

The desire was confounded, and confounding.

'I think,' Anders said, 'I do want to provoke you. This doesn't seem real. I keep waiting for the moment this will turn, for you to strike out. What are you waiting for, a command? Come here.'

Bless the wall for its cracks. The fine muscle in Fenris' forearms rippled, the expression tensing.

'You,' Fenris said, 'truly are a paragon of fucking bravery, to say that to me.'

'Better,' Anders said. 'Keep breathing.'

'I am tired of hurt. I am tired of fighting every memory when it comes. When I do not know what is real. Each night I fear that I will open my eyes and this will have all been a dream. I will be in that room, this sack of flesh, this nothing. And you think you can just order me--'

'I've seen it all before,' Anders said. 'Show me your pretty little prick.'

Fenris moved fast, but after last night his weight was too familiar for it to hurt, and the wrestling was brief, boyish, too close to an embrace to reject. Sharing breath, not looking down. Anders moved his hands along the painfully flat, firm chest, hard as the bone and breath beneath. The nipple startled him on discovery with no swell of flesh to warn on the approach. The navel, too, on the downward path, another twisted scar. Fenris kissed him again, then caught and held his wrist, too firmly.

'Provocation aside, if this this isn't good for you, we can stop.'

The anger shuddered away. Fenris said into the pillow. 'This is good. But I cannot convince my body of that.'

'I still want to touch you. It takes time after great injury. Ask any soldier. Months, years, sometimes. I don't mind--'

Several uneven breaths. 'I mind. This is humiliating.'

'Sex is not always about humiliating specifically you,' Anders said, with both high affectation and a lisp.

'You are trying so hard not to beg. You want to touch me so much.'

'Oh, Maker, yes.'

The restriction went slack, became a warm hand cupping the back of his. Anders moved his palm down slowly, Fenris moving with him, across the shivering hard stomach, to the fuzz between his legs. Anders sucked in a breath.

'Fenris. Open your eyes.'

The fear sparked and fled, Fenris' mouth warm on his, as if trying to devour him. To distract him from what he touched.

Everything was so neatly tucked away, sheath soft and small. The hair fuzzed like silk, not curls, short, fine and straight. Just touching the hair, Anders knew it was black as midnight, felt his mouth water at the thought.

They kissed more, until Anders felt Fenris forget himself, and move against his hand. The sheath shifted like a foreskin, sliding over the hardness beneath. The opening was damp when Anders touched it, widening.

Fenris arched. 'Don't-- poke in there.'

'Does it hurt?'

'No, just. Not right--' A hiss.

The length firmed when Anders returned to exploring. He did not speed his stroke. Undemanding. Persistence rewarded eventually with a gasp. A change in the texture, the exposed length now smooth and slipping.

'Can I look at you? Fenris?'

A nod, hasty and hazed, the eyes elsewhere. Sinew flickered beneath that skin like a storm, hips moving into Anders' palm. Thrust free of the sheath, the long, slender length was dark, wet all the way, the tip leaking heavily at the end of each stroke. Anders' grip slipped delightfully. Touching the sharp head, trying to roll it against his palm earned another hiss and headshake, so Anders kept with the simple motion along the length. Fingers, if not a fist.

'Faster?'

No. Slow.

It went on too long, Anders thought. Fenris arched and rolled and eased. The signs were close enough, whatever the anatomy. He reached the point where Anders swore he should have peaked, over and over, until Anders' arm ached. He would not let it show. The breaths last night had not been sobs, but Anders recognised the pattern spreading the ribs.

Then Fenris shoved him away. Prick arching away from his stomach, the trail of fluid from the tip holding Anders' gaze. Fenris' hands went to himself, one tugging while the other pushed against his abdomen at the root, where the sheath stretched almost painfully around his width, fingers splayed and knuckles white with pressure.

Stopping, in disgust. Fenris dragged the back of his hand over his eyes. Then back to his cock, wrenching hard. Wetness bled out.

'Have you seen enough?' Angry and hurt, the eyes refusing to meet his. 'I cannot. Try me in my sleep. You would have more luck.'

Anders touched the angry fist. 'Tell me what it should be like. If they had never touched you.'

'What do I have to tell you? That Danarius used me almost the same as the-- the templars, except he at least let me fuck him to deliver the benefit. I do not know what this is supposed to be, except difficult. He would lie back and read a bloody book-- This is pathetic. You should be laughing.'

'Maybe if you stopped trying to rip your dick off.' Anders wove his fingers through the willing hand, slowed the angry motion. He could hear Fenris grinding his teeth.

He was so hard, and so long. Harder than any human male could get, the resistant bone obvious beneath the silken, slippery thickness. A fear at the strangeness. Desire for it, regardless. Always so close together, those two, the longing for the unknown. How deep could he take it?

Anders drew Fenris closer, for more comfort. Used a different hand than before to spare his arm the ache. He rested his head against Fenris' forearm, where the hair was thick, if fine, on end, and soft as cats.

'I take forever to heat up. But when I do, I come like an adolescent, uncontrollably. I was always so brilliant at getting people into bed with me, not so brilliant on what to do once they were there. Probably one reason why I rarely slept with the same person twice.'

Fenris' eyes were scrunched closed. 'Last night.'

'Exactly like last night. It comes boiling out of me.'

'You are hard now. I can hear it in your voice.' Fenris rolled his hips.

Anders exhaled, let his fingers slip so lightly around the tip he knew now was hypersensitive, making Fenris jerk. Anders pinned him with a hand on his hip. Familiar rhythm, but such an unfamiliar prick in his hand, the body beside him so powerfully compact Anders felt like mist and feathers in contrast, ephemeral.

A silence, while Fenris fought a battle in his head.

'Thrust,' Fenris burst out. 'I always liked thrust. Not-- floating fingers or tingling touches, just being buried deep and hard in something sopping wet.'

'Someone.'

Harshly, but without maliciousness. 'Would you call a slave a person? Something. If I thought to knot, that same urge to thrust would be irresistible, until I could be inside. Then it would change immediately. Wanting-- all the touching only then. The softness. The peak and fall would keep coming, lost in it--'

'How long...?'

'Timeless. Forever.'

'Uh. Thirty minutes?'

'Not quite. We are not animals.' Fenris was coming apart, knees wide, heels against the bed. 'But certainly longer than humans.'

'So lucky. For me even the best is gone in seconds.'

Fenris touched the back of Anders' hand, him held fist within fist. 'I like that--'

'I noticed,' Anders licked along the ear closest to him. 'How much do you like it?'

'Don't let me go, if I-- Can I?'

'Of course.'

Strangeness and pressure, with Fenris' hips moving short and sharp to fuck his grip, violently. Enough that a thrill tingled through Anders again, arse tightening with need, cock stuttering its own rhythm, untouched. Imagine that prick, thrusting like this inside him.

Fenris moved Anders' hand from the length to the thickening base. Slippery and weird and-- 'Hold me. Tight as, tight as you can.'

Dissolving into a soundless cry when Anders complied.

Somewhere in the interim, the body rippling against him uncontrollably. The abundant wetness leaking over his rigid grip. No need to try to imagine, Anders felt it instead, in the body left wracked and vulnerable at his side. He tried to adjust his grip once, which made Fenris cry out like a lost child. Just holding. Tight. In disbelief, Anders came against Fenris' hip where the bone crested skin with strange grace, called to it by the ceaseless startled longing Fenris kept trying to stifle.

After a time, Fenris cleared his throat. Peeled away.

Anders chaffed the cramp in his forearm discreetly. Maybe there was no way to have sex and feel less than rueful. 'Thrust, eh?'

Fenris went to rub his eyes, paused to wipe his hand on the sheet, and resumed the action.

'Don't.'

'Don't what? Talk to you?'

'It-- I can't-- your hand.'

No pity, Anders reminded himself. Fenris had killed to avoid pity before. 'Good, was it?'

'No.'

Foolish, how much that stung. 'Could have fooled me.'

Fenris rasped, 'I forgot about Aleissa this morning.'

'I'm sure she can manage for one morning on her own. You might be happy to hear this house is fully plumbed and heated.'

'I should go.' Stumbling into his undergarments, bundling his leathers together. Childish in his clumsiness.

'Fenris. You told me not to let you run.'

'This is not running.'

'Tactical retreat. Needing space. Deflection. I'll call you a hypocrite or laugh. Don't-- Forget yourself. Don't do this to me, Fenris, don't leave, not now.'

Not a flinch, if only because it racked the whole body, half clad as it was. The leathers were placed on the foot of the bed, slow and deliberate.

'I will have a bath,' Fenris said. 'But after, I have to go to Varric. He might have a job for me.' A pause, a swallow. 'Come with me.'

Anders resisted the urge. 'An apostate doing mercenary work? As if that's not a dangerous profile in Kirkwall. You know even Hawke and I gave up the smuggling some time ago.'

'I have guarded you well enough before,' sharply.

'And I've heard that one too many times before.'

Fenris softened, which was his apology. 'I would prefer not to go alone. There were templars at the Hanged Man last night.'

Anders surprised himself with how fast he exploded out of indolence. A hairtrigger, still. He tried to pretend that mere sight of Kirkwall could banish those months underground with a darkspawn magister and corrupted spirit warring in his head.

But even months of steady life in Amaranthine had not banished the fear seeded into him in the Circle. Just as the Circle had not wiped clean the memories of the Anderfels, the fear of being lynched. As if each new fear he encountered used the old fears as a foundation, until terror itself was a tower, or a way of life.

'What did they do to you?'

'Nothing,' Fenris said. 'Not there, not in public. But they were there. Let me go.'

Too quickly. Anders lowered his arms. 'What happened?'

The chin dropped. 'I learned not all of them are dead.'

'Every templar--'

'I am not so insane as to think I can kill every templar. The ones who took me. They are not all dead.'

'But I killed Karras.'

'There is another,' Fenris said. 'I saw him and I did nothing. I...dropped my sword.'

His voice raised to an obvious pitch. Anders could not bring himself to ask.

He followed Fenris into the bathroom.

The tub filled with water pummelling down, steam rising thick. Fenris did not know modulation, either off or on, no intermediary position even with a tap.

'Are you getting in as well?'

'You want me to?'

'No. I simply wish to bait you into performing an action I will kill you for.'

'You say that like you're joking.'

A smile through the steam. Fenris did not move his legs to make room when Anders had finally stripped to join him. The ankles were bony, the muscle above straight lines and strain. The hands settled over the groin, the brow into unhappy lines.

Anders let the heat ease him. Languid, at last. 'Are you going to wash my hair for me?'

The eyes opened, such an unusual shape in puzzlement.

Anders remembered, this was how you dealt with Fenris. A touch of brass. Hawke had won him by mocking him for whining. A Fenris stripped of denial was powerful.

'Am I pushing you? Tasked beyond capacity, bath slave?'

Fenris' hand drifted to the surface, away from the modest pose. Fingers as idle as the eyes. 'Your hair is nearly long enough to throttle you with.'

'Is that something else you want to do to me? Gag me, now throttle me?'

The eyes went dark. 'Fuck you.'

Anders felt his thighs tighten, involuntary. Rubbing one out was never enough.

'Yes,' Anders said. 'All right.'

Fenris moved so slowly the water only rippled, did not sound. His fingers hard on Anders' thighs, arching over him.

'There are things I want to do that are not. Right. Not right to do to another person.'

'That depends.'

Anger, but the curiosity was still there, a crack of light under the door. 'On how much power I hold. How much I can demand without retribution.'

'No. It depends on the person.'

Fenris shook his head. 'It is not right what I want. I know. I cannot control-- So many vulnerable people. I could bend them, break them. I could take them, see? This is not right. The only time I can get hard by choice is when I think of hurting. Then. Even just then, I imagined...hurting. And humiliation. Have I horrified you at last?'

His mouth felt dry. In all this water, beads clung to the ends of Fenris' short hair like jewels.

'It could be the other way around. You get hard, but all you can think of is hurt?'

A slow headshake.

'You haven't told anyone else this, have you? No, of course you haven't.'

The throat bobbed. 'I am corrupted. I am mad, holding such violence in my head. You know it.'

'That's not why-- Look, Fenris. You know the difference between thoughts and reality.'

'Those boundaries always blur for me. Down there...the memories which insist on returning. What of the day I cannot determine that difference?'

'Should you live in fear of a day that might never come? Pretend each day is a demon. Fight it.'

They both flinched when something dripped, off in the steamy corners.

'It would be easy to say it was just violence, what happened to you. But they did it to you using sex. I think anyone who's suffered such violence will have these thoughts, these ideas. What happened to you is a part of you. Better to know the shadow side than to deny it. Thinking, dreaming, is all very different from acting.'

'I imagine,' Fenris said, with odd emphasis, 'every time you speak so, that this is something that has happened to you before.'

'Well. It happens. Don't feel alone.'

'I do not like you telling me how to feel.'

'But you like it when I tell you what to do.'

A minor irritated look, Fenris' nose wrinkling. 'Perhaps you should wash my hair.'

'Certainly, master.'

After finding a more comfortable configuration, the warmth plunging back into the water was the better for standing. Anders used his hands and a soft palmful of powder, Fenris leaning back into his chest, the building milk stopped only by the brows. He melted into the fingers on his scalp. Anders only stopped when his forearm cramped again, letting his arms rest loosely around the pronounced collarbones.

They lay still. A heartbeat rippled through the water.

'You really like being petted. Let me give you a proper rub.'

'Why is your stomach growling?'

'I'm hungry. What do you have against massage you always deflect it? Just say no.'

The eyes opened. 'I want to penetrate you.'

Heart leaping into his throat again. Anders could not stop the smile, Fenris unreadable from upside down.

'I already said yes. You'll need more than that to shock me with your depravity. Is that what you're trying to do?'

The teeth were bared, brisk and sharp. Jagged lowers, like fangs, too many fights chipping away at the integrity.

'Let me tie with you.'

If Anders had been an elf, the question would have only been courtesy. 'Yes, of course.'

'There is a thing, to put in. To hold my spend inside after the finish.' Fenris said a word in Arcanum. 'To bottle you up. Like a cork.'

The shock roared through Anders, unable to keep it off his face. Blood flooding in after, high and reddening, ripe as a strawberry. Fenris looked grimly satisfied, slumping into the water with the wash spreading from his hair, as if to say, you see.

Anders tried twice to speak before he trusted his voice. 'I know what you mean. All right. But I'm not walking around with it in.'

Fenris twisted, but now he was expressionless. Guarding his cards. Trying to provoke.

'I will bind you--'

'No.'

A tiny recoil, hurt and fear, Fenris' eyes creasing closing.

Anders stroked the wet hair, the fine brows. 'Yes or no, just a word. Not a judgment.'

'I will come on you.'

'Yes.'

'It will go to waste.'

'Barren ground.'

'I will blindfold you, you will not know who uses you--'

'No.'

Brisk, impersonal. 'I want you open. Loose. I want you to take my whole hand. When I fuck you after, you will barely feel it. Stretched, until you could not clench on me even if you tried. And I will make you try, I will make you struggle to keep me out, I will hit you. When you cannot stop me, I will mock you. I will spit in you. Then you hold yourself open and wait for me to come again, when I want it, if it is ten minutes later or two days, keeping yourself so.'

Anders could not play this game. Knew his own face for clearer than a page.

'Yes.' Maker. 'All right. Yes. But after, you don't dare leave. You stay with me. You never say a word to anyone.'

'You will come so many times,' Fenris said thickly. So hard to know. 'Until you weep.'

'Yes.'

'All of it will go into your mouth. I will drink it from you once you have warmed it.'

Fuck. 'What else do you want?'

'Tell me yes or no.' A thread of panic. 'You...started this. The yes or the no. You have to say.'

'Yes. Yes, all right. But what else.'

'I want you to fuck me.'

Remembering what they had done to him. The hurt behind Fenris' eyes when he asked, a fear of disgust. 'I'm not certain. Let me look first. To see if there's any lasting damage. Scars.'

Fenris' mask collapsed, anguished and ashamed. 'Look with your tongue.'

'All right. Up over the side of the bath, knees apart.'

'Wh-- Not now!'

'Why not now? The water's cooling, and I warned you about my responses. Now.'

'No!'

'Was that a serious no, or a wrestle me and make me no?'

Heavy breaths. Wet, Fenris' hair fell lower, a fringe ending just above the wide eyes.

'I accept your affirmations and denials in single syllables. For you to accept mine we have to fight?'

'But you want to fight.'

Dissolving into an outraged cascade of water, Fenris down first, then Anders, as Fenris caught up the wet tail of his hair and pulled it across his throat. Kicking, with the brief advantage of height and surprise, until Fenris' hand planted on his face, keeping him under water. Suffocating, or drowning? Adrenaline was close enough to excitement. Fenris' thighs were firm, pinched against his hips by the tub. The fadelight flickering at the corner of his vision.

The roaring uncertainty was so alien Anders knew it was not his own. He knew these games better than his own hand. He was not dying, except of Fenris' uncanny brilliance. He was hard enough to make wrestling an honest danger to his manhood.

Striking out close enough to the other's groin to threaten, Fenris cursed and recoiled. Anders lunged upwards, arms sliding around the narrow shoulders until he could hold one tense arm twisted across the flexing back; risked his own groin by straddling a leg to keep it still. Fenris went over with startling submission, palm planting on the wet floor beside the tub, hips high. His free leg moved across, spreading himself.

'Good boy.'

The water settled. A choked laugh more torn than gifted. 'Your own perversion I know,' Fenris said, strained. 'My own is the surprise.'

'I've seen you panting less after taking down a group of raiders. Are you ok?'

Groaning. 'Yes. Do it, then. Finish it.'

The insides of his thighs were as hard as the thick muscle at the back. Hipbones pushing through spare buttocks. A thick trunk of lyrium marked the knots of spine, moving between the cheeks. Hesitant, Anders used his one free hand to spread Fenris wider. Not pretty. A lyrium root curled into the edge of the orifice, following the tailbone, the most obvious shining scar.

He thumbed the line.

'I believe I said your tongue.'

Warmth and water. The taste of soap, not yet skin, too clean, too well washed. Anders wanted to lick and lick him, until the proper taste of flesh and arousal came through. Fenris did not moan, only twitched, his breath a little rough. Broadly swiping first, to map the terrain, but Fenris opened under the pressure too easily. The warmth of his skin flashed into heat, a fresh sweat. The dusky colour opened to darker red, wet.

In the heat, there was the lyrium, the taste suddenly obscuring everything else.

Still, Fenris did not move, legs apart and bared. Holding himself open now, because Anders was not. Lust, ridiculously high; the brief laughter of their struggle submerged. Lyrium. Anders could have come just fucking him like this, with his tongue. A displaced, yearning homesickness swelled, filling his stomach with inappropriate hunger.

I can't, Anders thought. The mouth was a traitor. He wondered what colour his eyes were, hoped Fenris did not turn.

Fenris did not turn. 'This is the extent of your examination? You are not very thorough.'

'I need to use my fingers.'

A hesitation, felt in the leg Anders straddled, his cock pushed flush against the back of the thigh. Anders rocked his hips.

'Do you feel that? You'll need my fingers before you can take this. I'll make it quick.'

'All right.'

'Slick.'

'Uh. I know where it is in Hawke's room.'

Anders laughed, helplessly.

Fenris shook his head, the nape of his neck flushing. 'Too far. Touch my prick.'

The dark pubic hair tapered gracefully off the sheath's tip, water beading along the curve. Anders stroked firmly, skin slipping over the welling knot beneath, until the droplets turned milky. Slick enough to coat a finger.

So warm inside, so smooth. Fenris held his breath, but the legs twitched, spread further. Resistance gone. Anders pushed in a second finger.

'You love this.'

The breath exploded out, still not a moan. Fenris twisted to reach back. Two of his fingers pressed in beside Anders', who caught the briefest flash of green eyes before the lids fluttered closed. A gasp.

'So serious. Get your hand out of the way then.'

Tracing his own wetness around with the head of his cock. Slowly, waiting for the moment the body or the man would reject him. Anders pushed into the hole. So good. Unbelievable. The lyrium scar made a hard point in the yield, a cool metal prod pressing against the upper curve of his erection as he thrust into the brilliant heat.

'You have to stop,' Fenris said.

The bath trembled at the brim. The voice was disarranged.

'Fenris. Beautiful. Perfect. I'm almost all in.'

The body was ice under his palms. The shoulders were tied, knotted. Hands fists on the floor. The breath so tight in the throat it was a constant whine.

A whisper of a plea.

Anders pulled out slowly, erection dying.

Fenris did not move.

He had to clean them up. Shameful, useless thing, he should have kept this part of himself caged. The lusty heat of Fenris' words a lifetime away, unreachable. Best forgotten. Clean bathsheets in a closet by the door. Anders wrapped himself quickly, bringing the second to Fenris, who had not moved. Lift him out of the bath, get him dry. Wrap him with a second sheet. Hold him. Try to put warmth into him again.

'I'm carrying you to the bed, all right?'

No response. Fenris looked asleep, lips pale.

The bedroom smelled of sex. Anders put Fenris under the covers, opened the window, added the winter covers to the bed, and dressed even to the stockings. He vacillated between staying out of reach and holding the unconscious form. The cold hands decided him, and Anders climbed in, tucked Fenris against his chest. This time he was solid, Fenris the one light as air, gone. Empty, drained by asking for what he could not be given.

Under the confusion, old righteous anger, the demon stirring.

As Fenris began to stir, under the silence.

The eyes opened, but were horrifying, as if the personality had been abolished.

Anders crushed the hands between his, pressed the dry palms like paper against his heart.

'Here. It's yours. Take it. Throw it away. I don't know what I'm doing.'

Befuddled. Expressions flickered over the features. Fragments of identity. Contempt returned first, lip lifting into a powerful sneer. The hand curled over his heart, and Anders was lost. Fenris was his golden self, heat whistling through flared nostrils, more solid than flesh, lyrium glow.

Which died almost instantly, before Anders even felt the palm push more than flesh against him. Fenris looked horrified. 'What am I doing!'

'Huddling for warmth.'

The face wrinkled, eyes lifting again, as if a curtain had blown away. Sadness unending. Now came the pity, the self pity. The curtain down again, Fenris veiled behind. The breath curled against the bones of Anders' cheek. 'I am sorry.'

'You should never have to apologise for the consequences of your ambition.'

Dry as the parchment palms. 'They say this in Tevinter. If not in quite the same context,' Fenris conceded.

He was far too cheerful.

'Kiss me?' Anders tried not to beg, because it felt like he had lost something.

Sour, a hint of bile. But Fenris kissed the same, seriously, without hesitation.

'I need to dress. Then we should go to Varric.'

'Yes, I remember,' Anders said.

He left while Fenris dressed, as Fenris was trying not to expose himself, as if they had not done anything naked together. Anders kicked at the rugs and reminded himself not to forget his boots. Fenris emerged solemn and worn in the old leathers.

'What would you like, Fenris. Not what you want. Tell me what you would like.'

Anders spoke with less conviction, as if he had broached what should not be touched.

'I would like to fall in love,' Fenris said.

Anders did not know what to say.

The lips twitched. 'But I am aware this is not necessarily appropriate.'

'You should never rely on me. I often do the opposite of what I intend. Through force or otherwise.'

Fenris was placid in acceptance. 'You assume I meant with you.'

'Oh. So you didn't mean...me?'

A shoulder lifted in insolence. 'Perhaps it was too forward of me to expect happiness. Love is the next best thing. If not so pertinent for one alone.'

Anders lowered his head.

'Are you still hungry, apostate?'

'I-- Yes.'

'Orana will have a second breakfast waiting at the Hanged Man.'

And didn't you train her well, Anders did not say. He did not want to dare. There could be purpose in duty, and whatever Fenris had done for Orana to deserve her duty, he was not sure he wanted to know.

Varric was for once unaware when they entered his unbarred room, rubbing his eyes as if his sleep had been worse than theirs, turning startled from his chair.

'Not you again, Blondie. Six months underground together, and you couldn't stay away? Listen, Fenris.' A sign of how much Hawke wore on Varric those months underground, his irritation raw. 'What have you been doing while we were gone? Half the guilds have it in for you, the other half an embargo against you.'

'I did what was required.'

'You've been prudent enough to lie low these last few weeks, at least. Three whole bands who disappeared into the coastline, with you the only survivor. This is almost as bad as the templar bodies.'

Anders watched the hunch deepen, then ease. Fenris was blank. Fenris wore isolation closer than armour, to protect those moments too sensitive to expose.

Fenris said calmly, 'It was necessary.'

'No, Broody. You don't say things like that unless you want to admit fault.' An awkward, half-feigned sigh. 'I assume you uncovered slaver connections, is that it? Listen, half of Kirkwall has slaver connections. I have slaver connections. Living in this world, surviving in it, sometimes means accepting you'll brush shoulders with monsters.'

Then the silence crackled.

'Monsters,' Fenris said, considering. 'There was a raid on the alienage while you were gone. I sent the children running for the guard, for Aveline. But that patrol had been paid off to turn away from their usual route, and the children had to hide from the morass of a Kirkwall street at night. They could not reach Hightown.'

There was a myriad of things in Varric's room which could reflect. In each, the quick flash of teeth, Fenris picking at his skeleton of words.

'I held the gate, dwarf. With Merrill. A blood mage and I, defending elven freedom-- Should I laugh? Minrathous turned on its head, a miracle. We did not let the slavers leave the compound. My next three jobs I contracted in good faith. Once in the dark of the Wounded Coast, my companions turned on me. Tell me I should have accepted my own death.'

Fenris' hands were fists. Anders could feel the bones of Fenris' hands, stark against the soft leather gloves. The chill of another night of fighting for his life, cold ash in the air from a dead fire, the lack of sleep, the desolation. The slither of steel and sand.

What better way to feel alive than to fight to live, Anders might have thought. He had lived that mania before. Threw himself into the worst of pointless battles.

'That version of events,' Varric said carefully, 'no one's told me.'

'Which is why I am telling you,' Fenris said.

'Not even the elves I asked.' No clear accusation.

An unsteady silence. 'I imagine the headman protects me where he can. The slavers came in such numbers because they knew I was there. I fought as much for myself as us-- for the others. Do you see? What I am is a weapon. Something wrong. What I can do cuts both ways.'

'Maybe you should leave Kirkwall,' Anders said.

The eyes on him were greener than the sea.

Varric interrupted. 'I'm starting to think that's a very good idea. Not just for you, Broody. This is not a good time for apostates. Or for dwarves with capital interests in Kirkwall real estate.'

'If only you could carry the Hanged Man along with you,' Fenris said. Sour.

'And here I thought he'd forgotten how to joke.'

'I have made no attempt to jest, dwarf.'

'And yet, elf, it comes to you. What's a world without humour?'

'Efficient,' Fenris said. 'Will you tell me of this job, or shall I guess and you can note me for warm or cool?'

'Definitely cool,' Varric said, grinning. A thumb jerked in Anders' direction. A phrase which almost sounded like a threat, always disturbing from Varric. 'He's not coming along, is he?'

Fenris' eyes caught with Anders' again, and held. Anders shrugged uncomfortably.

'Varric's probably right. It's not a good time for me to be revealing myself again. The templars might have even forgotten I exist, we've been gone so long.'

A moment of doubt in Fenris' eyes, fear. Which was too frightening to accept.

'I'll be here when you return. Gives me a chance to catch up on my sleep, at least.' Because it was too close, his awareness of this body. A deep inclination of head, which looked too much like submission for Anders' comfort, where he could see the pulse in the throat and wanted to touch it with his teeth.

'I'll be coming along,' Varric said. 'It's a big job for a lone elf.'

'You do not trust me after what you've heard?' In a particular tone of voice.

Varric spread his palms, appeasing. 'Your words, Broody, not mine. I don't trust an ex-Crow on this contract, either. You might find the backup welcome.'

'The details.' A double take, and a suspicious, 'There is no such thing as an ex-Crow.'

Anders closed the door and stood in the hallway, in a stripe of sunlight which was too warm.

Too fast. Too sudden. The emotion overwhelming, where it had been a seed, a grain, a sprout, now a tree which threatened to split. He looked at his hands and could not believe, for a moment, that he had moved them along Fenris' flesh. That the elf had given himself up to those hands and let it come, with a moment of forgetting what it meant. Anders thought about what path to take.

He went to the kitchen.

Orana was not begrudging with the pasties, but was likewise liberal with her stares. Anders resigned himself; since the half-heard fight last night he had been expecting this. When Norah rescued the second tray from Orana's unwary hands, she shooed the girl outside.

'Talk to the healer then, if you're not going to focus until you do.'

Anders bowed a little when she approached, which made her blush, and stare at his fingers where he wiped the pastry grease off on his sleeves.

'I am glad to see you are...' a loaded pause, Anders thought wryly, 'better than you were last night, Messere Anders.'

'Thank you for the stew, it was delicious. We enjoyed sharing it.'

A nod in acknowledgement, cheeks flushing. 'Fenris says you and Maste-- Messere Hawke are not magisters.'

'That's generous of him. The way I understand the contemporary use of the term in Tevinter, a magister is any mage wealthy enough to involve themselves in politics. I have no wealth, admittedly.'

'But you and Messere Hawke are involved in politics.'

'In a...an unofficial way, myself. Hawke has the greater intentions for the city. For a while I was happy enough just to free one mage at a time from the Circle here.'

'So you are magisters.' Almost relief in Orana's voice, as if all she had been looking for was a guarantee.

'But not every magister intends to enslave. It's illegal here, and one benefit for acting politically is that you have to act within the bounds of a nation's politics. You should be more afraid of the apostates here than us two lone magisters. We have to answer to Kirkwall. Meanwhile, no one is there to police the apostates.'

A quizzical stare. 'Please don't make fun of my fears, Messere Anders.'

'I wasn't--' A breath. 'You're right, I was. I'm sorry.'

Orana was mollified. Her fingers wove through the fringe of her apron's ties. 'Will you hurt him? Please don't hurt him. Sometimes I think he tries to get hurt because it's what he understands.'

But Anders could not explain. Could explain nothing.

'You can't protect him from everything,' Anders pointed at the little knife in Orana's belt sheath, 'any more than he can protect you all the time.'

'But he tries,' she insisted. 'So I have to try too--'

'Listen, you're a pretty girl. Fenris is too old for you.' And battered. All rough edges. He would hurt her, Anders was sure. You did not pair a broken sword with a precious vase.

Almost breathless. 'Fenris is kin. I don't-- Not with him! Not him! Did I-- No! No. No.'

Anders wanted to laugh at her emphatic denial. A sudden lightness, incongruous.

Orana said, oddly mature, 'But you must know we feared him for exactly that in Minrathous, as much as we feared our mistress. And his master.'

'Sometimes we fear him in Kirkwall, especially without a master. When he could kill us so easily, just for the sake of an irritating hangover-- A master might curtail that, you might think, if he can't master himself. Does Aleissa fear him? The children in your orphanage when he fetches them their honey?'

A considering look. 'Sometimes we do.'

'That's normal. Being afraid, but only sometimes.'

'Do you intend to buy him to keep him safe? He would like to obey, I think. Some days I need to order him from the bed. To bathe and dress and eat. Fewer days now than before...'

Choking; the thought of Orana snapping commands at Fenris. 'That's all very well for you to say. If he doesn't kill me first for trying, then I'd be responsible for everyone he does kill. No chance. It's difficult enough to be responsible for my own actions, especially when you're brought up not to be.'

Puzzling. 'We talk of this, Fenris and I. That we were raised not to-- know how to be alone. Were you also a slave? Some apprentices are, until they please their magister.'

'Not in the way you would call a slave. You know of the Circle?'

'That's where the Tranquil work.'

'I was -- what?'

'In Tevinter. I don't know much, messere. The Circles are where the Tranquil mages live and work, making beautiful things for the region's consul. Mages who find no master may go to the Circle.'

To be made Tranquil by mages stronger than they. To be turned into something productive for the magister already possessed of enough wealth to turn down a slave's mage child petitioning for instruction.

Even in Tevinter. Power was the corruption. Not magic. Nothing but power. Every symbol, every relic which justified these abuses, which hid them within the walls of custom and tradition, could not be withstood to survive. Power had to fragment, fracture, divide, until all were equal in their vulnerabilities.

The outrage overwhelmed him, unexpected. These triggers and flares, every conversation a trap.

Fenris stood before him, brands blazing, hands loose and ready to lunge.

'You will not threaten her. Restrain yourself. Do you see your eyes?' Fenris drew his sword, the blade angled for safety. Threw the fragmented reflection back at Anders.

Frustration made him swell, as if his skull could not contain the emotion. He felt the parts of himself shift and spread, cracks widening. Fenris filled his vision. The lean, practical shape of him.

Anders could no longer see the details against the increasing blaze, but he knew them intimately. He clung to the memory of that skin against his skin. The queer lilt of rue and affection he felt after the orgasm. I have been inside that. If only briefly. Warm and mortal. Understandable.

Justice battered away sentiment with rage. Restraint. He was done with restraint.

'I can't--' Hollow, shards. His grasp slipped again.

'Orana,' Fenris said calmly, without looking away. 'Did the abomination touch you.'

'No.' As confused yet as focused as she had been when Fenris killed her mistress. Abominating was too common, Tevinter or Kirkwall. 'What do I do?'

'Go inside. Close the door. Keep this silent; the staff chatter here.'

A heel scuffing, click and slide of bolt.

'Anders,' Fenris said, and the voice broke. 'Anders?'

Fenris let the sword lower. His brands softened, such pain on his skin. Closer. Lyrium in the air. Foreign grief tainted the rage, a memory of homesickness Anders forgot how to feel when he forgot his home. Lyrium made Justice so homesick Anders wanted to weep for him in shame. Would have used Fenris as the magister had. As the templars. Anders bundled the knowledge and threw it at Justice, a little package of disgrace. Shall I suck him? No milk from a mother's teat, this. Do we want that?

His mouth watered. Slavering beast. Demon.

'Anders. Apostate. Do you hear me.' The throat thickened. 'I will not let you end it like this.'

Justice ceded control too abruptly in the face of Anders' shame, leaving Anders gasping, his skin stinging as if sunburned. Fenris' palms closed on his cheeks, warm and dry.

'Are you well?'

'It's getting worse. I told you. Like an overwound spring. Tell Orana I'm sorry. She did nothing wrong.'

'The demon wears you like a shell. Have you not thought of separating yourselves?'

You foolish child, Anders wanted to say. As clueless as Orana. Because he was already lost, could not be protected, could not even define his intentions.

'In Tevinter they could have. But here?' Anders laughed, as hollow as before.

'If it is simply a matter of Tevene ingredients--'

'It's nothing. Only so bad these days because I'm on the edge, all the time, because I haven't got a single way to act productively now the templars are everywhere, and all Kirkwall is running too scared for me to find the support I used to. Mostly I need to sleep. Regain control.'

'You cannot let yourself feel anything then, not even--'

For you. Fenris shook his head abruptly, stepped back. The distance a cold river.

'We should stop this now.' Without inflection. 'Do they not teach you mages how to bind your emotions?'

'That's the problem, binding. Some people can't do it and live.'

'Then those people should not be mages.'

'Do you really think that suppressing everything makes for a better mage?'

'Otherwise it makes for a dangerous one.'

'I've been trying to understand you for six years and I still can't. And you are the one who wants to fall in love. Who-- pushes me!'

'You push me in return.' A child's riposte.

'You think the sex is a problem? Suddenly? That this comes about because of a bit of a base rut, after talking all that to me this morning, after--'

'Not the sex,' Fenris said. 'The feeling.'

'Tell me what you think love is.'

'Not risk,' Fenris said. 'Not this, between us, feeling wary, uncertain all the time. It is...clean sheets on the bed. And meals at the same time every day. And a person who does not make...a fog in the air with problems just to cloud the truth--'

'That's not a lover. That's domesticity. That's Orana. That's your sodding mother.'

Anders did not understand the expression on Fenris' face.

'Sorry. Sorry. I shouldn't shout like that--'

'Tell me what you think this is, apostate.'

Anders struggled for breath. Did not want to think of Fenris -- going away, into himself, catatonic. Of knowing he could cause that.

'I don't know. Desire. Hunger. Devouring. But finding comfort in knowing no matter what it can't get worse. Because neither of us are more than what we expected of each other.'

'You are.' Steadily.

'What?'

'You are. More than I expected.'

Then Fenris' shoulders slumped in relief, and Anders felt also relieved, that neither of them were dead yet, and by tacit acceptance that this was as far as Fenris intended to go.

'I need to collect provisions,' Fenris told the dirt between Anders' feet. 'It is a trip to the Coast Varric intends; I will be gone a few days. If you still wish it, I will come to see you on my return. We can continue this discussion.'

'Do you still wish it?'

Then Fenris' gaze rose, somewhere in the internal darkness Anders felt the yearning solidify, a moment of unison with the unspeaking other.

'Don't answer,' Anders said, 'Go or stay, as you will. I'll be ready for you.'

A mocking tilt of head. Fenris took his leave.

In his bedroom which was Carver's, Anders shut the window and shivered on the sheets which still smelled of Fenris. He tried not to think. His arms felt tight, constricted. His books were all still in Darktown, hidden behind a wall Isabela had helped him construct; glyphs were too easily dispelled, and a templar raid never expected physical subterfuge from a mage. His thoughts strayed to the books he should not have possessed. Kirkwall had once been Tevinter, and Tevinter was eternally at war.

For the second time in his life, Anders experienced the distinct notion time was short.

Definitions of responsibility. A slave held no responsibility for what happened to him, for what a master might order him to do under duress. Neither did a mage, not for so long as they were within a Circle. Protection as well as prison. In Kinloch Hold, Irving had taken personal responsibility for Anders. Spirit healers were rare enough; Anders was aware the First Enchanter's frequent intercession was all which had kept him for Greagoir's mandate towards Tranquility. But spirit healers were also the closest mages to the Fade.

Wynne came for him specifically, a healing to be performed on a woman ravaged, who had died twice despite more senior healers on the trip to the tower. A temporary barrier which stopped time and heart alike had been closed around her. Anders studied her through the barrier, sight if not touch, noting the corruption of filthy injuries. Readying himself to reach through that place he felt was centered between his eyes, the waking link to the Fade. What would flow would be warmth, healing, a feeling of exhaustion as the Fade spirit used his mana, if only a portal. A link. Fade spirits only ever felt like power; they had no personality. He reached for power.

Anders worked furiously, inside, outwardly his eyes open and his face calm. Wynne frowned at him. The master was jealous of the apprentice, he thought; in his focus he could see the line of irritation between Wynne's brows. He thought it was good for masters to be jealous.

When he was ready, he nodded. The trio of mages dropped their barrier, and he healed the woman, forcing the infection and rotting flesh out of her wounds, forcing the broken flesh to remember the pattern of itself, whole.

The screaming took a long time to stop. Anders remembered it, felt it in his core. He was afraid of so many things he could not find the room to be afraid of what had reached through him in that moment. The blood which had filled his mouth, and him not even remembering when he had bit his own tongue, swallowing the salt. The woman was healed, wasn't she? Not even a scar. Let her be grateful, and he could continue to protect himself from what he felt with a mirthful air.

It was Irving who asked him if he knew what he had done. 'There's a difference between demons and spirits. Spirit healers learn this sooner than most.'

Anders felt his cheeks pinking. Rolled his eyes irrespective, spoke to the absent Knight Commander, 'Did you ever imagine, there's a difference between spirits and demons!'

Irving looked at him intently. 'You have luck I would not credit had I not seen it act on your behalf before! You are lucky, lad, that what demon you reached was seemingly as youthful and careless as yourself, to act out of curiosity for this world without intent to fully enter it.'

But out of fear, he wanted to bluster. 'A demon is only a demon when it seeks to control. I was controlling the flow. I was in command. Tell me how what I touched was a demon in any way.'

'Is that what you believe?'

'That's what I do. I reach, I find, I use. With due respect, First Enchanter, you're not a spirit healer. The waking Fade is not like what you walk in your dreams. There's power everywhere.'

'Then you tell me, child, what the waking Fade feels like to you.'

Patronising. Anders fought to keep the sullenness from his response. 'It's-- what it is. A person's private feeling expressed in a flow of power.'

The old brow furrowed. Irving tilted his head. 'A fair definition. So I will ask: why do you have private feelings of rage and a desire to hurt when you heal?'

He didn't. To protect. To act without encumbrance. To be the best. Everyone would know him for the best, they would come to him from far and wide. But he would never be the best, they would never let him be more than he was here, trotted out on a whim to perform. And then they scorned him for his performance! How they had all scurried to convince the woman's grieving husband that her trauma had been normal. She was alive. She would forget about it in the years of life and memory that would follow.

'Do you feel remorse?'

Of course he did. So sickeningly huge it would sweep him away if he allowed himself to feel even a fingernail's worth of it, a single falling tear turned to a flood of horror. He tetched and rolled his eyes.

'As a spirit healer, you are part of a great tradition.'

Old and stoic and unchanging, endless foolish rituals to perform before action was possible. All that mattered, what he could do with what he found when he reached.

'It is not a tradition which begs for display. For showmanship. Or even for critique.'

'Then why is everyone so offended? I'm not possessed, her ladyship is not possessed, she walks again, she's alive! Tell me what I did wrong!'

'If you cannot tell me, then I fear you will never know.'

A tremor in Irving's voice. Anders had escaped six times from the Circle without malicious intent and been returned, each time without malicious intent from frustrated templars; the Circle had its rules, and he could push them as far as he was allowed. Irving championed him each time. Just a lad, Knight Commander. He has so few friends. Just teenaged rebelliousness. I hear his girlfriend broke up with him most heartlessly; this was his grief speaking, wasn't it, Anders? High spirits, Knight Commander. Think of what an asset the Circle would lose if we were to follow this punishment to its conclusion. And it cannot be undone. Let us not regret this too soon.

Greagoir was less forgiving in his inquisition following the inadvertent demonic contact. 'Tell me the difference between aesthetic blindness and moral blindness?'

'I'm not hurting anybody.'

'You will hurt someone with that attitude.'

'How about me? You're hurting me with your attitude.'

'I'm warning you, Anders. Freedom is a gift. Against my wishes Irving has given you a level of freedom unearned, in the belief that you will grow into his gift, as if you were a rawboned youth who required the room to move.'

He would be watched. The gardens were no longer his domain. At no time was he to be left alone. A senior mage even accompanied him in his dreams, even when Anders indulged as a young man indulged. He was called to talk with Irving twice a week, when surely the First Enchanter was too busy to waste his time on a sullen youth. But they continued to speak, even if across a divide, Irving's council of calm and acceptance as bewildering to Anders as his own insatiable desire to experience an intangible more was to Irving.

'I council only patience, Anders. Learn well enough how to walk the line now. You will be granted privileges as free and open as Senior Enchanter Wynne. Prove you can be trusted and these restrictions will be lifted.'

'I shouldn't have to prove anything to you!'

He reacted to his new restrictions with a brooding silence, a new habit for him. It was never good to let them see how much they affected you.

And inside, the walls were falling. He was a shell of silence with dreams full of whispers, while panic clamping tight around his chest, his stomach unsettled constantly. Time was slipping by, faster and faster. They were watching him because he was no longer safe. When even the conversations with Irving were let lapse, Anders knew. They would make him Tranquil.

Anders stared out the window in Irving's office, distorted glass as if even a view was not to be permitted, when he thought he heard Irving sigh.

'I have tried, Anders. What do you want from me?'

'How about you tell me my name?'

Because he had forgotten, in the grief of being torn away from his home. Because his mother had denied the templars this, as if it was the last thing of his she could keep. Because, Anders remembered, his father had not cared enough to give it.

So he asked for what they could not give him. He turned from the window with its broken view.

The seventh time he ran he knew he could not let them bring him back, knew it like he knew fear every day for over twelve months of false freedom, clinging to the seconds of life left to him. How easy he had found that year to pretend. He never cast a single spell. The girl he slept with and lived with and maybe even liked, who had twined their names together on a tree, hers true and his false, pretending at a marriage of which she could be proud. The rest of the village was less forgiving of his presence, the youthful timewaster who knew how to make potions but very little else, beyond a feverish mallet of charm which struck only the equally vulnerable.

'Freedom is a gift,' Greagoir reminded, when the inevitable occurred. Freedom, not even to be his when he ran. And still Irving fought for Anders, fought against Tranquility with equal horror, when Anders refused to beg for leniency. He was so hurt he could not beg. His girl had been pregnant when they took him away. He was beyond pride. He spent his first few days in solitary staring at the stone walls and ignoring the trays of food and water before he realised he was not Tranquil; he had resigned himself to the fate. In the dark, he forgot how to hide with no one to hide from. Felt his expressions with his fingertips, exaggerated them. Imagined himself a pantomime mask. He remembered a river and the shadows of bridges on the dark surface of the water, running dark even in sunlight, a river that raged and flooded the town on the night the templars reclaimed him, destroying places he had stayed, eaten breakfast, daydreamed idle without a watcher, the lives of people who would never wonder where he had went, thinking the river took him.

His eyes were wet and he could not conceal it. He did not like remembering. The mind threw up only confusion. He closed it off carefully, along with his name, his mother, the murders he committed with his bare hands, Tabris' abandonment, and all other things which had hurt him.

'This will not end well,' Anders told an absent Fenris.

Who thought more of him than expected. Who looked to him for something Anders had no idea how to give, when Fenris had found it all on his own, even to the forgotten name.

Then Anders wiped himself off and thought of sex instead, which was warmer and easier than rivers and expectation and worthless memories. Simmering so easily at thought of Fenris' voice and Fenris' prick, the startling sleek pubic hair, the way the body had not rejected him even though the mind had. And minds were mutable. They could play the vagrant mercenary and patient lover. Better than playing magister and slave, templar and apostate. Anders would cook, or at least tell someone else to. It would be beautiful. No accidents or frustrations this second time, now their bodies knew each other. The smell of spice coming through Fenris' skin, lips burning with too much chilli. This time he would let Fenris suck him, unafraid he would shame himself coming too soon.

Anders wondered at the lust curving sudden against his palm. All his abstinence, had he been only waiting for this image on which to latch? His fantasies spun and peaked. Settled around an image of clean sheets and constant food.

The morning slipped away. The days which followed. He recovered his books and even dared Kirkwall's streets, while the irritation inside him wound tighter at his idleness. Anders committed war on it, vengefully, finding the odd place of loveliness in the old Tevinter streets and sitting, waiting.

It was two weeks when Hawke returned without Carver, carrying an arrowhead through the meat of his left arm and signs of infection. Anders helped him undress and prepared his equipment, needle, thread, forceps, a flame clean knife and water.

A strip of leather for a gag. Hawke laughed, almost delirious, but Anders insisted.

'To stop you biting your tongue off. This will hurt.'

After, Anders bandaged the wound, spotted with clean blood. Felt guilt again at his incapacity. He should have been able to make this right.

'Do you think if I indulge Justice, he'll let me heal again?'

Hawke spat the leather bit. Slurred. 'What does he want you to do?'

'Something. It itches at me. To do more good.'

'Easy enough. You're doing me good right now.'

'You're not big enough for Justice.'

Peevish. 'I feel insulted. Spirits judge on size.'

'Something like that.'

Even pain-hazed, the gaze was savvy. 'And how does Fenris compare, in terms of size?'

'You would know.'

Then Hawke's hand rose, palm moist and still with blood and dirt on it, cupped Anders' cheek. His head nodded close, breath sour with tiredness. 'You sound more like yourself than you have in a while. Underground, you were...I was afraid. I'm glad for you.'

Hawke being maudlin was horrifying. 'What happened on Sundermount? I take it Merrill still wasn't happy.'

Silence. A hard swallow. Hawke's eyes flicked to the discarded arrowhead.

'You see, but you don't see.'

'What do you--' Revelation, sickening. 'Hawke, that's a Dalish arrow. Why were the Dalish shooting you?'

'It wasn't my fault. Sometimes that never seems enough. Not my fault, but they still think it should be my responsibility.' A one-sided shrug. 'Merrill is back in the alienage. She's alone now.'

'She was always alone--'

'No. Alone. She's completely alone. They attacked us, Anders. There was a demon, and the Keeper was--' Stiffly, 'I don't want to talk about it.' A sudden anger, 'I want to hit Fenris for doing what he did with Merrill's mirror. He had no right! If he hadn't, Merrill never would have needed to speak to that demon again. She was making progress. She cleansed the taint, do you even know what that means? She could have cleansed the taint from you. From any warden. Who knew how much Merrill could have discovered, and he just throws it away because he thinks strength gives him the right--'

'Stop it. Even Carver knew that mirror was bad news, why you always thought differently I'll never know. You're not a second Andraste, Hawke. A Champion through negotiation more than might.'

'Is this going to be about Isabela again? That was not my fault, either! What would you have done in my position?' The yearning came clear, which underlay all of Hawke's anger; a desperation for knowing the right answers. There were no right answers.

Anders shook his head. 'This daydream you had of bringing the fight to the Dark City itself--'

Hawke folded, sagging and old. 'A creation out of nothing. A hope out of nothing. Now Merrill has nothing.'

'We've all been there,' Anders said, helplessly.

'I keep thinking, I could have said something different. They demanded I take responsibility for Merrill. I wouldn't. They attacked. Said they couldn't let her leave if she was going to keep doing what she was doing.' An unsteady stare. 'Fenris was there. Whatever he was doing near Sundermount, he came through when I needed him. Him and another elf, an ex-Crow, he said. Fenris never mocked. He took Merrill to the alienage. If you want to go to him there I wouldn't blame you.' A hiss. 'They're all dead.'

'I won't leave you alone in this state.'

The gratitude on Hawke's face was striking. Anders helped Hawke on the stairs. How had he done it, straight from the old warden prison immediately into-- Merrill's personal disaster. The despair shivering under his words was exhaustion, Anders told himself.

Hawke disappeared into his room. Anders returned to his book, only startled from his doze when the main hall's bell rang.

But Bodahn would answer it. Anders rose regardless, sliding on his coat and checking his laces. No blood on his hands. Disappointment he would not acknowledge, when the caller was not Fenris.

'Messere,' the woman looked familiar, Lowtown garb and a small curtsy, confused as to whether she should direct it to Bodahn or Anders. 'I had hoped to speak to the Champion, who helped my family once before. I had heard he returned recently.'

'Messere Hawke is absent,' Bodahn, smoothly. 'If you leave a message for him--'

She bit her lip, finally focused on Anders, though her eyes kept slipping in shame. The apostate lover. Too much to hope Kirkwall had forgotten him, lying low.

'Thank you, messere. It is my brother, who is a templar recruit. He speaks of you as well as the Champion, as having assisted him against blood mages some three years ago when he was -- taken.'

'Keran. I remember. You're his sister, Macha?'

'You do remember. Thank you, I had hoped--'

'What's happened? More blood mages, I assume?'

The woman flinched, then bolstered herself visibly. 'I pray by the hour that it is not. But he has been missing for near a week. Ser Thrask, also of the templars, came to our house last night to check discreetly, but I knew straight away. He could not keep it from me. Have you heard--?'

'Perhaps he's had a change of heart and run to the sea? I wouldn't blame him, with what templars handle these days.'

A disturbed look. 'No, serah. Keran would not do that.'

'And you thought Hawke could miraculously find Keran again?'

Now she looked relieved, as if Anders had given her a promise. 'Thank you, serah. He was last seen by his fellow Ser Paxley, on a special inspection of the Hanged Man a fortnight ago. If you have time, it would be appreciated. My brother is everything to me.' Macha gave him her address. 'I work night shifts, you will find me here during the day. Please don't hesitate to wake me.'

And then Fenris was there, having materialised out of the dusk light suddenly from behind the girl as she went to leave. Her skirts swished as she dodged the collision. Because Fenris would not step aside, Anders knew, heart in his throat.

He was thinner, even after this short a time, lips chapped and hair lank. The memories of him were cleaner, more beautiful. But Fenris was never clean, never particularly lovely. Striking. The shoulders hunched.

There were no obvious wounds, and the only blood was old and dried on his leathers.

'Bodahn.' Fenris nodded a greeting. 'Yet to leave for Orlais?'

'Still not found a suitable replacement. My exacting standards, as you know.'

Then a nod at Anders, but even that did not seem enough for Fenris, who fought inwardly then offered his hand. Unexpectedly bare. His skin was always so warm and dry.

'Hawke is home? I had to send him here while I saw Merrill to her house. He would not come, injured though he was.'

They were speaking through a fog. The fog of someone else's problems, Anders recognised.

Anders said, 'You did a good patch job with the arrow. There was no poisoning, no serious infection.'

A short nod. 'I have not always had access to healers.'

Fenris was staring at the side of his face. Anders touched and felt the blood flake away. From Hawke's hand, he remembered. Fenris' eyes moved to his eyes, then his mouth. The tongue flicked across broken lips.

'You never told me you were going to Sundermount.'

'It was unexpected. The Crow we were assisting had been staying with the Dalish and paid extra for us to return them his gratitude. Varric left, but by the time I arrived.' A slow headshake. 'Merrill will be well. The alienage had already accepted her, when she made herself available to them. She will be the first Keeper in a city's walls.'

'You don't sound unhappy with that.'

A hesitation. A strangely small voice. 'I have thought her a fool, called her one before. She pays the price now. I do not wish to revel in her suffering. Not when her suffering hurt her people more than she. She never revelled in my lowness.'

Anders remembered himself when Bodahn shut the door. 'Will you come inside?'

'You are being nice to me?'

'I could be nicer. I could offer you a drink.'

'Tea,' Fenris said.

'Tea,' Anders agreed.

'You did not shave for me today.'

'I didn't know when you were coming. Do you expect me to shave every day, just on the chance you might--'

'Yes.'

'You often have expectations that will never be met.'

'Often is not always.'

'Sometimes,' Anders ceded. 'Sometimes I might remember to shave.'

Then had to let go of Fenris' hand to lead to the kitchen, lest they stand there so long even awkward would not serve as a description.

* * *

First there was the promised tea, warm and surreal through the fog of his thoughts.

They conversed, about Hawke of all things, and Merrill, further. The words came necessarily stilted. There was more Fenris could have said to Anders, but the shock and betrayal of the Dalish massacre was too close, too much a reflection of what he remembered too well when the Fog Warriors had died at his hands. He walked down from the mountain trailing a pall of ghosts, Crows and Dalish alike, unable to shrug them off. Disposing of the bodies had taken the most time, with Hawke incapacitated and Carver with Merrill; it had been himself and Zevran digging the pit, using Sundermount's cliffs and falls to their advantage. Death itself was quick, Zevran had noted; it was the rest of it which took forever. A lifetime, the elf said, black humour which Fenris could neither admire or despise.

That had been a shock of its own, finding that his supposedly impoverished tattoo artist, once lurking in Lowtown, was instead an ex-Crow, as startled to encounter Fenris in Sundermount as Fenris had been to find him at the end of the quest.

'Tabris used to speak of Zevran,' Anders said, standing to ready a second pot. 'An ex-Crow, certainly. One with a predisposition for not returning her letters.'

The myth would always reoccur, Fenris thought, that what they did mattered.

Fenris only gradually realised he had fallen silent, not at thought of Zevran, his relationship with whom had never been more than rudimentary. Confronted instead with the remains of his solitary predicament.

'I cannot go back to the alienage.'

The elven blood on his hands. Merrill had wept against his shoulder, snotting against his neck. Then she had hit him, in the face then beating on his chest, like a child from the orphanage in despair against the unfairness of it all, small fists beating against his leather as if trying to provoke a solution out of him. It should have been Hawke she wept against, or Carver. Anyone but him, stoic and silent. She had dared him to call her a monster. She called him one, for saving her life in the manner that he had.

Anders hesitated, then said, 'I half thought that Varric would have convinced you to run while the pair of you were out there. You could start again, elsewhere, without a reputation.'

'Did you wish I had run?' He did not know which answer would please him more. Risk and safety. They wanted different things. He wanted to stop running. He wanted to stop hating.

'I hoped to see you,' Anders said, stiffly. 'You know that.'

The tea was suddenly insipid. They sat here across from each other at a table, as if domesticity had been on his mind all the while plodding through the monstrous mountain trails. No clean sheets, no safe land. If his fantasies and erotic, half-remembered dreams had all been vague and dark once they restarted, since Anders' return from the underground prison every one of Fenris' wants had realigned to target the mage, barbed arrowheads, his vulnerable, willing, present flesh.

Fenris put his palm over the cup when Anders went to pour.

Anders put the teapot down. 'A bath, then.'

Why was he delaying? It hurt. The urge to reaffirm his survival was not unfamiliar to Fenris, not with the wars he had fought. It was only now it was tainted with hope, or something he could not name. Fenris could not read the face, which was grieved and warm and familiar at once, which did not soften into the desire he sought to remember.

Perhaps Fenris had imagined it. Pity, not lust. His fist clenched over the memory of fingers.

He stood and reached for Anders, who allowed himself to be pulled down to a kiss. The set of the shoulders made Fenris careful to miss the mouth, finding the corner only. Fenris thought the mouth might have smiled against his own.

The thigh pressed between his was unmistakeable. Anders turned his face to reclaim the kiss properly, which burgeoned, and became dangerous. At some point Fenris tasted blood. His lips cracked.

The wall was against his back, rough and supporting. That solid dick pressing against his belly would point straight ahead when unconfined, Fenris knew. Shuddered in shock again at how he knew. Anders gasped for breath and Fenris grabbed and reversed their positions, the tiredness gone in the beat of this particular pulse. He pushed against the mage, grappling for what would make him break and moan. Not the fingers which ripped at the fold over cloth over his groin, nor the mouth which devoured. Of all things, it was the teeth Fenris closed on the mage's earlobe. A whimper when he sucked. He found the scar which made a knot through the soft flesh and pressed his teeth along that line. An old piercing. Anders whimpered.

'Unfair,' Anders gasped, 'if you didn't want to bathe you could have said.'

'You know what I want,' Fenris said, to see if Anders would tell him.

'Do I?'

The fingers worked at his crossed belts, laying the pouches with some reverence on the nearby table. Knelt, after, with little grace, unpeeled the leathers from sticky skin with some effort and beached the waistband just below his balls.

Fenris could not look down. He felt himself unsheathing, the eager desire a thing increasingly separate from himself. Still too terrified to look at it. He pulled Anders away, a caterpillar from a twig, the mage's tongue having left a cool and chilling stripe along the crease where thigh met hip.

'Not your mouth.' His own was dry. 'I told you.'

'But you'll let me have your arse.' The eyes were disbelieving and hopeful at once.

'Yes.'

'And you'll let me have your mouth.'

'Yes, mage.' He was impatient.

'But how do I know you won't -- as you did, in the bathroom, before.'

'I don't know,' Fenris said. 'I never know. But I know what I fear. I think of you in me, of spilling in me, and it is the same fear which makes me long to rush to battle as vanguard, so that I do not have to wait. But when your mouth touches me there it is blankness, as if I am nothing, and I cannot--'

'Enough.' Anders was panting, forehead against Fenris' hip. His hand clung to the narrow part of Fenris' waist, hot and heavy even through the leather. 'You want me to spill in you. Inside you.'

It confused him. 'Are you asking for permission?'

Anders opened his eyes and looked up, black with lust. 'Sod it. Bend over. Over the--' Fenris saw Anders fix on the table, saw the rejection, the eyes sliding past. Fix on the bench which housed the sink, and its drain. A large bucket of water within from the pump outside, a reflection which Fenris shied away from, his motion against the sink's edge breaking it to ripples. The window over contained a new tray of seedlings; beyond, a few of the manicured courtyard, wind moving in the trees.

Something had him reach to open the casement, the warm air gusting in. Anders' hands flitted over his hips, hard then soft. A rummaging through the pantry, a slick touch which Fenris tried to ignore. Fingers. He did not like fingers. But they were bearable. He wanted the man.

'Let me tell you,' Anders said, 'I have been lying awake every night looking forward to your return.'

Fenris felt the touch inside him turn, seeking. No. He tensed despite himself. The breeze moved his hair.

Anders' free hand stroked along his spine. 'I've not had a mercenary lover before. Or even one who's been away to war, or worse. The waiting could kill a lesser man. You should admire me my restraint. Apart from once. No, twice. I've been...very good.'

Fenris' stomach tightened, sheath heavy, full. Anders' hand moved around him, a featherlight touch to the bared tip. Then a firm touch around, stroking the pubic hair if not the shaft.

'You like the thought of me holding myself back. Or is the thought of me, abusing myself at thought of you?'

His thighs cried to spread. The trousers had only been peeled down enough to bare his arse.

'Mage, if you don't soon--'

Anders did not laugh, but the breath sounded as if he wanted to. 'Forefront of the battle. Brace yourself, then. Annexation commencing.'

An unpleasant emptiness. Reminiscent of the horror of what they had done to him, how they had kept him, open to their whim. Fenris looked at the sky, the grass, the tended plants. Did not panic. It was a careful choice. He looked at the bucket of water beside him, the surface feathering with his -- their motion. His fists eased on the edge of the sink. Anders was filling him slowly, as if pushing the cry out of him by inches. He let it come, welling.

The fingers laced over the tops of his, both hands.

'All right? You went very tight of a sudden.'

Sweat beaded on his brow. He lost his erection, shrivelling, curling inside his body in fear. But his stomach only clenched, not rebelled. The pressure was only uncomfortable, not a nightmare. The itch against that place inside made him feel like wetting himself. Falseness.

'Is it bad?'

'What?' Confused.

'Is it bad,' Fenris repeated. Why did his voice sound like this? Like a child. Dulled and fragile. He could not stop. 'You looked, before. Did they ruin me? All of it. I cannot look. I have not. Since.'

Softly. 'No.'

He pictured again the wounds he left, tearing through flesh with his hands, bloody tatters against the endless void. Surely he was a ruin. A temple defiled.

'Fenris.' The voice, from a distance. The hands tightened around his. A head rested against the space between his shoulder blades. Hairy thighs rasping against the parts of his legs which were bare. 'Stay with me? Please.'

The breeze through his hair. What of it that he allowed to remain.

'Orana stuffs her dolls,' he felt compelled to say. 'With the clippings of my hair.'

He felt Anders shaking. A laugh, unwilling and delighted. 'Fenris.'

The flesh inside him moved, an uneasy slide, back and forth. Again. Fenris bit his wrist, but Anders was there to stop him, fingers inveigling between. Into his mouth. He tasted butter. And himself, salty sweat and thick leather. He cried out at the shock. That it was not disgusting.

'Better,' Anders said. 'Oh, Maker, if you knew how good you felt.'

Like he needed to shit. Fenris knew the false sensation would go away. Tried to will his body into remembering, faster. Anders distracted him, fingers tugging at laces and buckles. The breeze found its way inside his vest, inside the hanging shirt. Anders' fingers danced along his belly, traced the ink he had chosen, the lyrium he had not.

'Open your eyes, Fenris. Keep them open for me.'

He opened his eyes. No walls, no corners. Windows and gardens. Bucket of clean, cool water. He could barely even smell himself.

'Even better,' Anders gasped. 'Ah, you love this? It feels like you should. I don't want to hurt you, but--'

He wanted to thrust. Fenris knew that sensation, the anatomy difference aside.

'I want to. I did, once.'

'Once?'

'Love it. More than any other. They used me, they all used me, some great honed sculpture of elvenhood. Or for the lyrium. He had me fuck him. While he read books, bored. She, as well. While I fucked and tried not to sweat on them and tried to spill as quick as I could, and it was foul, always, after. Their filth, all over me. I hated...being bound to them. Even when I longed for him, for his approval, for other things.'

The arms went around him, tight. He could feel the cock moving easily now, sliding. So smooth and sleek, these human pricks. So vulnerable. He had always liked being fucked by humans. He remembered Erik. Who had taken him the first time, hard and hurting, after the Tevinters had had the boy the same way. Some long months of pain before Leto worked out there were other ways to do it, with less hurt; but Leto had thought it not so terrible, not compared to the warmth that filled him for days after, feeling, remembering. Secrets that not even a master could see on his skin. Fenris had enjoyed the same, later, daring Danarius to discover exactly what Fenris offered any other slave he could tempt to defy the master's ownership of him.

He wanted to spread himself so much.

Anders gasped, throbbed inside him. Fenris felt at last his own warmth swell again in response, prick heavy if reluctant, anxiety loosening its constraint.

'You like being buggered.' It was uncertain, almost strident.

'They ruined it,' Fenris said, and wondered that he sounded so petty. He apologised, 'It is only sex, but it was mine, my liking--'

'No.' The pressure of Anders' thighs returned. 'I understand. It matters.'

The mage would slip and slide away from his fingers, Fenris had felt it in each farewell, in the shock of an orgasm where he had simply forgotten it ever meant something other than brief pleasure.

'I do not think I can finish,' Fenris said. 'Not like this. Every touch against that place, I...it gets further away. But I want you to.'

'Come inside you.'

'Yes. Mage--'

'Back to mage,' Anders said, faint mocking, but his hips began to move. Blissful, terrifying. Fenris clung to the time and place. Clung to the fingers webbing again through his own. Clenched around the warm, living flesh inside him, his whole body focused on that single point. Blissful, and now frustrating. He felt Anders' need as his own, tightening his gut.

'Apostate.'

'Almost there.'

Faster. Fenris braced. He met the thrusts; it felt obligatory. 'I refuse to call your name.'

'I consider that a challenge.'

He gave himself up to it, in the end, as he remembered Leto always liked best, and later the master's privileged slave Fenris, letting the other expend the effort while he reaped the reward, always in control. His heart thundered to match Anders', his palms slipping sweatslick on the sink. A cry strangled against his spine, where Anders had rucked up his leathers and shirt to bare his back.

Fenris felt warm and groggy, as if he had been the one who orgasmed. His legs ached from standing, his arms from holding himself braced. From holding up Anders. The withdrawal shocked away the uncanny calm, a terrifying wet slide, as if he was turning inside out.

'No!'

Anders' hand was there, sudden, a pressure between his cheeks. 'It's all right. You forgot this part.'

An inelegant pose. Fenris pulled away as soon as he felt capable, hiding his face. He could not take even a smile.

They went only so far as to cover the pertinent parts before retreating. In the bathroom, Fenris let Anders undress him properly, from the greaves up, as if Anders enjoyed being on his knees; they traded item of clothing for item. He could feel the come sliding on his thighs by then, let Anders stroke him, sheath, balls, the slipperiness, with fingers that felt like they worshipped.

'You should look,' Anders said. Not smiling. 'I can get a mirror.'

Fenris shook his head. Climbed in, wincing. The heat would never cease to be a comfort. He knew without rancour his sanity had depended on baths. To his surprise the mage did not join him, still naked, going to a commode instead and heating water with magic to shave. A grin cast back at him via the mirror there, cutthroat wielded deftly enough for one who did not seem to use it so often.

'I take your point. You're raw,' Anders gestured at where the lather masked his lips. Fenris had scarcely noted the burn. Stinging, now.

A dissatisfied grunt, and Anders laughed, light and delighted. When he finished, wincing once only, he dropped the cutthroat into the steaming water and stepped over. Barefaced and mocking. A thin stripe of blood beaded, fell. Smeared by careless fingers, as if it were a drop of water.

'Poor soft-skinned elfling, upset that someone might know--'

The healing raced over and through him, myriad aches and strains from the Sundermount venture suddenly gone, from the chapped lips to the bruises and deeper soreness. The ache in his arse, lamentably, loosening then gone. Every lyrium mark stung as if rendered anew, the newer ink tattoos aching like sunburn, then even that was gone, Fenris' skin left alive and singing.

It had hurt.

Anders went white.

Fenris nearly fell in his haste to reach him, water flooding. Caught him as the knees went, went down with him, easing the way.

'Why...' Anders shook his head, dazed. 'Why. With you. Is it the lyrium?'

The idea soured what had come before. Curtly. 'You would have healed me on the Wounded Coast that day if you could have. It is not lyrium. It is blood.'

'Hawke,' Anders shouted.

What the lord of the manor thought of a naked apostate bursting into his room, Fenris could not deduce. He followed, bathsheet clinging. Close enough behind to see Hawke shout at being woken.

Then scream, clutching his shoulder.

A moment later Anders was being thrust against the wall, Hawke barrelling out of his bed in the bloodspotted nightshirt, useless bandages on his shoulder; slamming Anders, again. Again.

'Do you know what you've done? Do you?'

Fenris interceded. He could not stand. He let the lyrium light.

'Back off,' Hawke growled. 'You of all people should recognise what he did! Why do you defend him?'

When Anders' skin mazed and cracked, it was not unexpected. He was no longer anything resembling humanity, a form indicative only.

'Release me, champion of nothing. I do what is necessary with what tools are available. What you are incapable of doing.'

Hawke's hands slipped away, as if he could not stand to touch the shifting pieces, floating over the surface of a raw Fade. 'You swore to me this would not happen again. In the prison. You swore, Justice.'

'Our knowledge passes both ways.' Almost sorrow. 'The fugue cannot last.'

'Hawke,' Fenris asked. He could not look at the demon. He had not known the body was beloved to him until he saw it sundered like this. The hair, its subtle patterns, rendered meaningless. 'What is this.'

'A blood mage cannot heal,' Hawke said. 'A possessed mage cannot heal. Because demons do not heal. But a blood mage has a form of healing they can do. You must know of it. You would have seen it in Tevinter.'

'That is not healing. A blood mage trades vitality, from one to another. Typically a slave, with years of life robbed to lend health to the here and now--'

'Blood magic,' Hawke said. 'It can go the other way. The mage uses his own life to lend to the other. Anders will kill himself. And you -- why do you let him!'

The eyes of a terrifying sky. 'Anders' instincts are to heal. He reaches for every pathway available. I cannot stop him every time.' A pause, and the demon said, 'He has done it before without me; he knows the way. Justice is not in the tool used but the outcome; this is power, and its consequence, irrespective of the injustice delivered upon mages for their paths to power. Even now you would punish him, us, for what? I do not regret, I cannot regret. He seeks for freedom and power even in the impotence you would constrain him. Champion.'

The word was an accusation, Hawke flinching.

'A maleficar's justification,' Fenris said, hearing his own growl. 'If ever I have heard one. That whatever the means taken it is the end which matters?'

'A maleficar,' Justice said. 'And a Warden. We are both of those.' The false eyes fixed on Fenris, the reality of Anders' skin swimming as the head turned, surreal. A Veil tear through the centre of a body, straining to contain the power. 'The lyrium elf, who swore to us his sword in exchange for his life. Where do you intend on standing when the last straw breaks his back? You of all of us understand vengeance.'

'Enough,' Hawke said.

It reeked of command. Fenris felt the power brewing at his back as Hawke called on the Fade.

'Now you choose to take responsibility,' Justice said. 'When you have let him stand on his own before.'

'No,' Hawke said. 'Anders is my friend. That does not necessitate encouraging him to run headlong to his death. Release him.'

Disbelief on Justice's face, as obvious as a shocked child. 'You would have him powerless? He has fought for this. Wanted this. He is so close to finding his true power.'

'Release him,' Fenris said. He let the lyrium shift, until he matched the song of the Fade he could barely feel. Let his reach find Justice, move through him. He thrust. 'Demon, do you feel me inside you?'

'I have no heart for you to sunder. You will kill the body instead.'

'Did you not just say, whatever means necessary?' Fenris let the threat yawn through him.

Something hit him, hard.

Hawke.

He saw through doubled vision, the blurred conversation which followed. Heard little but the roar of his own blood in his ears. Hawke, talking down the demon. Hawke, promising who knew what. Fenris tried to crawl. Promises to demons ended in only one way. Out of nowhere the eroticism reoccured to him, of Anders touching him, making love to him. Still inside him. He was deluding himself. The mage reached for anything to remind him of his mortality, and all it took was a tiny speck of blood to lose it again.

Hawke shook his head. Shook his head. Denial. Fenris crawled, waiting for the dizziness to fade. Because it would, and he would--

Hawke nodded, reluctantly, and the Fade glare dissolved, the seams in Anders' skin closing.

Fenris launched himself at Hawke.

The mage -- the mage was unaware, startled. Did not raise a hand in defence, only looked defeated, already, to be borne to the floor by a glowing elf.

The acceptance tempered Fenris' rage.

'What did you promise the demon,' Fenris asked. Somewhere, he was conscious of Anders collapsing. It was not so important as this, Hawke, tired, shocked, unguarded. 'In the prison. Just now. Did you promise him Anders, as you gave Isabela to the Arishok. As you tried to give Merrill to her clan before I -- before I, of all people, defended her! Tell me!' He cried, 'As you would have given me to Danarius, all to avoid the fight?'

Hawke did not crumple. He looked calm.

'Anders made his own decisions. He lives with the consequences. Much as Merrill. And Isabela. I only promised Justice my help.' Hawke turned his head, pinned as he was to the floor. 'You should go to him.'

Mourning. Longing. He wanted Hawke, once. Fenris had not known what happiness was, but in retrospect they had been happy, for a time. There had been pleasures in existence. A mad hopefulness. What he felt for Anders was only an echo of that.

No. Not an echo. Different. A different brightness to the grief he felt he for Anders.

He went to his mage. Stroked the smooth, such smooth cheeks after the kiss of the blade. Anders opened his eyes, smiled slightly.

'I don't usually fall over when he does that.' The voice shook, tenuous normality. 'Did he say anything particularly embarrassing this time? More threatening to use you as a banner against the paradigm?'

'No. He-- It was not important.' The demon is winning, Fenris did not say.

'Illucid rambling,' Anders rubbed his chest, absently.

Where Fenris had threatened to kill him. The horror roared through him.

The robe dropped over his back startled him, Hawke lobbing the second at him when he turned. 'As much as I admire the view, I'd rather spare myself the inevitable black eye if I admitted it.'

'As long as I wasn't the only one stark naked.' Shockingly, the slide of Anders' hand along Fenris' thigh, where Hawke could not see it.

Mortal and mundane. Needs and wants. Fenris draped the overlarge human tailoring around himself, the belt looped twice over. Anders looked more comfortable in his, sharing a grin with Hawke, with an ease and a gratitude that confused and sickened Fenris.

'Your reliable if undistinguished seconds, I see.'

'Monogramming is expensive,' Hawke said, gently. The soft, near fond smile. It was not the smile of a traitor.

The distrust did not enlarge him. Fenris felt diminished instead, as if the boundaries of his world had widened to encompass a complexity he could not condone. He watched Hawke and did not want to see the hand which reached down to raise Anders to standing.

But it was just a hand. What had Hawke ever done except what he deemed necessary? The system which had conspired to place him in the position to make those decisions was not one Fenris could fight.

He went to resume his bath. Even lukewarm, the numbness was sanctuary. Anders joined him after unravelling the superfluous stitches from Hawke's whole flesh, sliding between his knees.

'It gets worse,' Fenris said, into the silence. 'That is three times now I have seen...'

Anders' heartbeat feathered the water.

'I don't think possession gets better.'

He touched the damp hair, the pulse at the temple beneath.

'So much outrage,' Anders mused. 'I've done this to him, you know. To Justice. By being what I am. Corypheus only made it faster.'

'Was it not the demon's choice, too, to use you. He bears the responsibility as well.'

'He came into this world as unknowing as a child. I was never enough. To explain, to show him. I can barely explain things to myself.'

The body against his showed no sign, no demonic spore. No flicker of Fadelight, no wound or burn for the tearing within. Fenris ran his hands over the limbs, his scarred hands. Everything felt human and loveable.

'Acceptance. In the face of horror. Because survival is paramount.'

'Ah, well,' and Anders turned, a small smile, 'when you can just hop bodies that is less important than we think, to a Fade dweller. Again, I never quite explained well enough to him. It's too late now.'

Fenris found himself pressing lips to that brow, the lines and tiredness felt beneath. A battleground. He was less disgusted than he thought he would me, and more awed. That these mundane things continued, baths and conversations and touching, in the light of this sundered shell.

They rejoined Hawke after they had dressed, after Fenris had brushed his leathers meticulously clean while Anders watched, idle, the weight of his eyes like the touch of a hand. Hawke had stayed in his houserobe, pacing abstractly while Bodahn moved through the mail. He did not touch the healed shoulder.

His responses were distracted, Fenris noted. Bodahn noted too, he thought, the dwarf skipping certain letters with deft skill. Too much revolved around Hawke whatever his disdain for it. The stink of history burning.

'Keran,' Anders said suddenly.

Bodahn and Hawke looked up. The name went through Fenris like fire.

'While you were asleep,' Anders explained. 'His sister came in. Seemingly they've lost him again and thought you could do something about it. If you wanted to do something simple enough.'

But Anders did not know, Fenris reminded himself. Nor Hawke. Only he and Keran knew. The others were dead.

Hawke's exasperation was honest, at least. 'And what are the odds it's blood mages this time?'

'You know what they say. Once a blood mage victim, they find you again and again.'

Like me, Fenris thought. Always blood mages. Always blood.

They were discussing finding Keran. The words were blank to him, faceless as paper. He had begun to sweat.

'I must go.'

Perhaps he had spoken over the top of them. They looked at him.

'Of course,' Anders said. 'I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking.'

'Of course,' Hawke echoed.

Laden with sympathy. Now he could not even stomach thoughts of templars, so they thought. He thought of murder, until his stomach turned. He assembled his disparate parts, shamed as they were. Went.

The blood on his hands. He was half way to the alienage, each step jarring, before he remembered. Merrill's angry fists, the eyes. He could not stomach any of it, what he was, what he had become. Killer, animal, beast. What people made him. Now this, a kicked dog afraid even of hollow boots.

He went to the Hanged Man instead. The desperation of the place even in daylight, which had nevertheless rose around him to deflect the templar last time. The alcohol did not lure him.

Orana was pleased to see him back, the kitchen staff scarcely stirring at his presence. Her smile fell, fast. 'What happened this time? Are you hurt?'

The Dalish presence had meant so much to the alienage elves, whatever bitter mutters they might have instigated about them. The Keeper had come to them more than once.

'No.'

For whatever reason her hands rose to meet his, holding tight. But he could embrace her now. She was no part of the images in his head.

His arms pushed a squawk out of her, surprised. Her hands fluttered over his waist. 'Fenris?'

'It is not all right,' he told her hair. Kitchen grease and smoke. 'Do you call Merrill a friend?'

'Yes--'

'Can you...go to her? I cannot. She has returned to the alienage.'

'Of course. When my shift is over.'

She did not question. A blessing. Fenris stepped away, displeased at the emotion. Orana smoothed her dress.

Varric did not answer Fenris' fist on his door, nor the call. Fenris slumped, contemplating the lock.

'As if the secrets of Thedas could be found within,' said Zevran, leaning, languid, by the frame. As if the golden hair and skin had materialised from the scarred, sunwarmed wood.

'What are you doing here?'

'Taking more illustrious lodgement, now my immediate pursuit has been so deftly disposed of. From my room I heard your unmistakable call of need.' A benign spreading of palms, the flash of a lockpick. 'Shall I assist your endeavour, my friend?'

Fenris phased, threw the latch and keyless dwarven-make lock from the inside, and withdrew his hand.

'Or you could do that,' Zevran said, smiling. 'If I had known your talents from the first day we met--'

Mask after mask. Fenris had felt, if not a full trust, at least enough to have let the seemingly down elf place the ink he so desired into his skin. To see him turn about now, the dusty beauty now an unrepentent gold no longer in hiding, made Fenris feel the fool.

'I continue to doubt they would have been on sale, had I known you would expose me to further vengeance. Only half of Thedas' nations and organisations have cause to set a bounty hunter after me now. Shall I strive further, and seek to insult the Divine herself?'

'Bah. The Crows will forget your involvement in this; they understand contracts. Nothing personal! I hope only they recall with greater clarity this time that I am not without recourse to greater resource than they.'

Fenris pushed open the door. He searched. Papers, parchment skins, desks of a wild array of inks. Profiles of persons, many of which were familiar. Hawke, again and again, angered and calm, frustrated and reasoning. Zevran contemplated the nude torso Varric had sketched, the words beneath in a scrawl too characteristic for Fenris to decode with his limited understanding.

The search felt like a fever on him. He had not known what he wanted until he knocked on the door. Only the chests were left, where Zevran and his curiosity proved useful, poisoned locks with their delicate needles and knots unravelled. The last took him some time, sunlight crossing the floor in bars.

'It is not a skill I have often needed,' Zevran admitted, an apology disguised.

Then it was there.

Fenris felt his hands shake. The blood running warm and sticky over his palms. His life, in pieces. One gauntlet was still whole, the other an insect's fragmented shell. Varric was meticulous, at least, the delicate screws and fixings wound together in a silk pouch. The Tranquil, he had said. Picking apart his life. The lyrium seams to the inner parts of his armour were hidden yet, each panel of hide folded to keep the secret within.

For years, he had worn nothing but this. Tended with care. He bled into the seams. It had been made for him. A killer. A dog on a leash.

'It is yours,' Zevran asked.

'It was.'

So flat and matter of fact, sympathy was not called for.

'It will take some work to restore, if you intend to wear it again.'

Did he? He did not know.

'You took arms against the Dalish when they sheltered you. Why.'

'I did not want to see you dead so soon after taking my coin. A man must have opportunity to spend his triumph, first.' Zevran's eyes were cannier than the smile, countermand to Fenris' snarl. 'Do you doubt they would have killed you without my presence? Your own comrades were against you.'

'Perhaps I should have died?'

'Second thoughts can do no good,' Zevran said. 'You are alive, I am alive, and the clan which sought to end a power hungry mage now sleeps in the dirt not their own. You are a lethal companion, to be sure.'

The whole gauntlet was the right one. He had killed many with this hand. Danarius' metal over his metal. Danarius' will over his. Shame he was accustomed to, imposed on him by the magister's disapproval or humiliation; it had been guilt which had been new, bubbling out of the untapped well inside him.

Fenris returned the metal to the chest. There was nothing to be done about the lock, disturbed as it was. He took paper and scribed, as painstaking as it was with Zevran watching, critical, an explanation and an apology for his invasive presence. Left it, for Varric. The lyrium in the metal could be easily rendered out and sold to compensate for the cost of recovery. Even the spirit hide was likely valuable, if Varric chose to sell it. Reuse was a better end than a burial, his first instinct on seeing the pieces.

'You are still here,' he accused Zevran, standing again in the hall.

'I admit to a further curiosity,' Zevran said. 'That we have more than one common acquaintance.'

'I already know about Tabris.' The name still hurt to say, reluctantly, a shadow of a memory of the weight over his back and the warmth inside. 'Anders, as well.'

A dismissive wave. 'True. But as I said, more than one common acquaintance. I had thought it would be some time before I could find you again; imagine my delight to hear you calling for help so profoundly in the hall. Will you come with me to the docks?'

It seemed expected of him. He went.

The many stairs. The templars that Zevran seemed to know to evade, which made Fenris recoil from considering how, and how much the Crow had learned of him; perhaps it was simple caution, the city's tensions stark in the glares between guard and templar helm. The docks were too prosaic a backdrop for the drama, in any case, too much true work to be done, the labour and gull cries and creaking wood and muscle washing through Fenris. Begone this detachment. The sun was warm, the breeze stiff. He could not always live by reaction alone.

Thus he was not startled when Isabela turned from studying a manifest, in a back alley whose benefit was only a slight upward incline and thus a clear view of most of the harbour.

'Hello, sweetheart.'

'As I thought,' Zevran said, in satisfaction.

He let himself be led by the pair of them, chattering as if it were not so wholly improbable for all of them to be alive. He felt exhausted, recalling the last time he could call rest was the aftermath of the burial, washing in mountain cold water before collecting Merrill and Hawke, Carver unwelcomed by the former and leaned on too heavily by the latter and his biting comments, as they walked the last day's worth of distance back into Kirkwall.

He should have taken Anders' offering of tea at face value, should have bathed and bedded, slept. Instead provoking the mage to mount him, hungering for the closeness whatever the risk. Filthy, and welcoming it.

They went onto a small ship, dwarfed by those with many masts around them. The small crew remaining were disinterested, the cabin which Isabela took them oddly businesslike, none of the drapes and swathes of rich fabric he had thought she would indulge. A single curtain divided the room from its bed, a fit looking girl ducking her head at Isabela in greeting and retreating.

'You look astoundingly different,' Isabela said then. 'I wouldn't have recognised you from behind. I like the hair.'

Her own was shorter, much; she looked both thinner and softer, in an indefinable way. Tired, but the smile was broad.

'Wine?' Zevran, at a fixed cabinet by the door.

'No,' Fenris said, as Isabela said, 'Certainly.'

They sat.

'Might I ask for an explanation,' Fenris asked, at last. His words lumbered.

Isabela laughed. 'I got away. Is that not enough? If you want to hear the magnificent exploits of the Queen of the Eastern Seas, well. Ask Varric. He's more the tale spinner than I, these days.'

'A dashing battle,' Zevran said, 'Enticing at last the Arishok to honourable duel--'

'Zevran. Hush.' Command in those words. The elf fell silent.

Fenris felt his brow climb. Isabela sighed.

'All right. So I suppose Varric never told you. I did write him; found Kirkwall was hardly any better than before, except without Qunari, is all. From what I hear the Qunari might have even been doing you all a favour by keeping the templars divided between watching the heretics and watching the mages. Now what do you have? A city that's all but a hairsbreadth from martial law.' Brightly, 'I bet Hawke enjoyed the trophy title Meredith gave him. Does it warm his bed at night? Oh, I forgot. That's Anders these days.'

'No,' Fenris said. The words felt unpleasant. 'That is a farce. Anders takes only what protection Hawke could give.'

'How delightful that Hawke feels someone deserves that from him.'

'And here,' Zevran passed Isabela a goblet, with a flourish. 'Vinegar, to suit your tongue.'

Isabela softened, smiled. 'Sorry,' again. 'It's been a while since I've been able to indulge with someone who knew the whole story. I'm over it. Waters passed, or pissed, as it were.'

'Are you well, Isabela?'

'Yes,' the hands shiny and tanned with work touched the back of his. 'Thank you for asking.'

'I would have written,' he found himself saying, dumbly, 'if I had known where. Or how.'

'I asked Varric to keep it quiet. I wasn't ready.'

'Now you are back.'

'A stop only,' Isabela said. 'I'm a privateer in the re-making, Fenris. I can't let myself be kept from a single keystone trading port just because I was once given up to Qunari to spare a lot of innocent lives. Now can I?'

'I suppose not.'

'I take it back. You haven't changed a bit.' She downed the last of the wine.

Fenris should have expected the kiss, wet and lush. It was generous and raised nothing in him; Isabela has always been generous with them. He remembered talking with Anders. All the embraces they should have given her, before she was gone. He stood to pull her flush against him, every curve a remembrance.

'Oh,' she said, 'and where are the spikes!'

'Buried. Gone.'

'Hug me tighter, you feel like a sodding tree, you daft elf.' She groped his arse. He laughed. They parted reluctantly, as if some ritual were completed. Isabela's palm slapped against his chest. Her wrist shook too much, the bangles chiming over scars not so old.

'Are you well?' he repeated, desperate. 'Isabela?'

'Of course! Look at me! My ship, my life, my freedom. Meanwhile you look as if you should be asleep.'

'It has been a long few days,' Zevran added.

Fenris could not have added more without turmoil. He shrugged agreement.

'I saw you're no longer in that rotting old mansion. Where are you now?'

The alienage, except not even there, lest he wish to confront this burden of guilt. A wonder that he found himself yearning for never having risen from bred. 'Between places.'

'Are you thinking of leaving Kirkwall?' A knowing gaze.

His answer was cut off by an unexpected cry.

The curtain rippled, and a child was running out, shrieking. Hands raised for Isabela, who gathered the plump, swaddled bundle and set it upon her lap. Tears stopping immediately, silent, only the trace fear remaining.

The eyes that went to Fenris were exquisitely familiar, even tear stained. The baby shape which he had become accustomed to so close to the orphanage, round wrinkled belly and fat thighs, swaddling not quite fitting. The dark hair was curling already, ears pierced with her first tiny droplet rubies.

'Fenris, this is Hero.' Isabela held the infant's fist and uncurled the sticky fingers. 'Hero, this is Fenris.'

The child blinked and put her fingers in her mouth. Sudden shyness. She retreated as if to re-merge with her mother.

'Hello?' Fenris tried

Hero reached for Zevran with emphatic arms, the elf taking her with a smile which turned his face to a riot of laugh lines.

The same challenging tone. 'Qunari won't give their mindnumbing poison to a pregnant woman lest they inadvertently numb the brain of a blameless child. When I had my chance I jumped, and swam for my life. Perhaps they thought I committed suicide in my shame? I was getting truly sick of the attempts to verbally indoctrinate me. I might have even begged for a mind wipe. Anything to shut up the damnable ben-hassrath.'

'I...don't know what to say.'

'As long as you don't say the obvious,' Isabela said, blithe.

Because the eyes: the shape more than the colour, remembered from Carver and Leandra, even a trace of it about Gamlen.

'You don't have to hold her,' Isabela assured him. 'I'd never held a brat until this one. Isn't she lovely, though?'

'As beautiful as her mother,' he felt obligated to say.

'Do you know I even believed he loved me? It was only a month or so before the whole Qunari affair. I don't know what I was thinking.'

'You were drunk, you tell me,' Zevran offered.

'Oh, yes, the usual excuse.' Isabela looked moody for a moment, rolled her eyes and resumed the usual animation. 'Usually I'm so careful, I don't want anyone to feel under any obligation to me, or the other way around; but I could have respected him, you know? I could have--'

'I have forgiven him,' Fenris found himself saying.

Had he? He must have, to so say. Isabela's face creased in tired lines. Then a smile.

'You always were a soft touch. Without your spikes.' She tilted her head. 'Why?'

Hero laughed at something Zevran said or did, bright and sudden in the close cabin. A sudden shyness in the silence which followed, abrupt, as if remembering the stranger in their midst.

'I will take her abovedecks,' Zevran said.

'Thank you.' Isabela watched them go. Returned her gaze to Fenris. Repeated. 'Why.'

Because he had placed expectations on Hawke that Hawke knew nothing about. Someone to take the responsibility for his actions, which Hawke had refused to do. 'Perhaps I am tired of being vindictive.'

'Well, yes. It is a draining investment, all that surly rage. Especially when it amounts to nothing. When you realise they are nothing. They were worth nothing, not even your time, or hate.' A purse of lips. 'I heard Danarius died on a templar blade. That templar blade?'

Under Isabela pointed over his shoulder, Fenris had forgotten he carried the weapon, the action of tilting the point of the way so he could sit a much habit as walking.

'This is a gift from Carver.'

'So you didn't kill your mage. Do you feel robbed?'

'At the time,' Fenris said, 'yes. But of the only freedom it seemed I was worthy of, not of vengeance. Now, it no longer seems to matter.'

Something in the way he said it made Isabela flinch, the wine glass spilling. She mopped it up with her shawl, the tassels darkening red.

'Practical of you.'

It had been too long. Years. The years of his life that the time in the templars' dark room and monstrous purpose had drained from him. There had been a time when he felt Isabela's face transparent to him, a study of peculiarities, bluff and braveness, bright and brittle. Her eyes were glittering now. She sucked the hem of her shawl.

'I am glad you are well,' Fenris tried. 'I still don't know what to say. But I am glad.'

'I lied,' Isabela said. 'I'm not all right. Not at all.'

A quivering in the fingers she held rigid against the table, the wrist over which the shawl was draped. He looked at her mouth. Saw more than heard when she spoke.

'I came here to kill Hawke.'

Some instinct had him ask, 'And now you are here, do you still wish to kill him?'

The mouth quirked. Glittering eyes suddenly awash with wetness, which did not spill. Isabela looked up and around, groaned.

'Andraste's sodding beard, Fenris. I docked two weeks ago. I don't know. He's just a sad man in a bad position. In any other world the templars would have taken him. He stayed for a family who died and dispersed regardless. Built his own cage and stayed. I'm starting to think...I had to swim a long time. The middle of the ocean. Sometimes it felt as if the thought was the only thing keeping me afloat, keeping me warm.'

Hatred can be useful, Merrill told him. Against cold nights, and solitude. But it devoured, much like flame.

'It wasn't his fault,' Isabela said. 'What happened. I think I accept that. But it is still his responsibility.'

'The child?'

A laugh, tension easing. 'She's the least of it.'

'Should I warn Hawke? That you intend to kill him?'

'Do I?' Mocking. 'Blades bared or otherwise, front door or side window, is that what you think? Well, if you can put aside the sword in the bed between you and Merrill then I suppose I should at least reconsider what a civil conversation will cost me--'

'--Merrill?'

Isabela looked surprised. 'Zevran was so certain there must have been something motivating the gallant hero's defence of the heartbroken mage on the mountainside.'

'Certainly not sex.' Only obligation. Which was more simple and more cruel.

'Well, that's a shame. All this time since one wretched night with Hawke, and you've yet to warm your sheets pleasantly--'

He knew his expression shifted before he could help himself. Fear and longing, to share. But she could not know. Not of a dark room warm and sickening as a womb, the clink of glass, of Anders' demanding grip and the warm weight of the body which wanted to shatter from within.

'Sorry,' Isabela said. 'My timing's been off for years. I didn't mean to pry.'

'My bed is warm enough without Hawke. Or Merrill.'

Barely audible agreement, or reservation. Isabela's mouth twitched to a smile. 'Accept where the future might float us,' she agreed. 'Without hatred as an anchor to tether. And isn't it a wretched thing having to steel yourself against the fact you might, against all doubts, survive the worst.'

He felt a spark of resentment, exasperation, at what could only be a kindness on her part. Because it demanded a kindness of his own in return.

Isabela kissed him again abovedecks, even as she reclaimed her child with accustomed motion from Zevran's arms, where he swore he would not tell Hawke of her, or of Hero, mostly naked and impossibly innocent skin warm as bronze, until Isabela had decided. 'I won't kill him,' she said. 'Sometimes I did wonder if that was the answer he always wanted: death.' Zevran waved farewell with excess exuberance, undisturbed by talk of murder or otherwise.

Orana would have finished her shift by now, found Merrill, would have offered what naive and generous comfort she could, if the First could allow herself to be comforted. The sword across his back felt heavy, but he went to Hawke's estate. Rang the bell at the servants' entrance rather than risk startling Bodahn again; the masters were out of the house.

In the room Anders used, Fenris could find no stand for Carver's sword and laid it flat on the floor beneath the bed. He crawled into the sheets.

Vertigo, unpleasant as he lay flat, but a usual consequence of overtiredness. He worried, for a moment, that he might dream, or that he had dreamed this and would wake to a different world. All of it was someone else's nightmare, Isabela's, Merrill's, Anders'. Or Hawke's. He had once wondered what he might do without Hawke.

But the answer had proven itself.

Now he was too tired for sleep, as if he had carried more than the burden of the dead. He thought of Anders. He had tried not to, while working. A mage, waiting for him. The familiar scent on the pillows if not the clean sheets. The thoughts were sweet and sad, and he marvelled that they were his to have. The dark which spiralled through them seemed lighter by comparison.

The room was dark when he was next conscious, the scuff of a boot-heel having woken him. Fenris blinked away the sleep, looked at the mage poised by the door. The unreadable expression. Then the lips curved, and Fenris yawned.

'I can't say I blame you,' Anders said. Stepped closer.

'Did you succeed in your search?'

'Not precisely. Varric's due back tomorrow, we'll see if he's heard any interesting rumours regarding.'

Suddenly the urge to confess to Anders, about Isabela and the associated encounter; rumours which he suspected Varric would not spread. Fenris shook his head.

'No? And what is that denial for?' Anders was sauntering closer, a bravado Fenris had not expected. 'It is my bed you've commandeered there.'

'Only through Hawke's generosity is it yours.'

'Wait until he thinks to start charging rent.'

'So long as it is not by the hour.'

Anders twitched to a smile. One knee buckling the mattress. The lips were expected, warm. A faint hint of some supper Fenris had been too tired to want, hunger flaring now, confused by the proximity of the body. He tugged Anders closer.

'So delightful to come home to someone in my bed.'

'Someone? Anyone.'

'You,' Anders corrected. The hand stroked, and Fenris could not stop himself leaning into the palm. Selfishly. 'What did you do today, after you left?'

'I went to a Rivaini palmreader.'

'Truly? And what did they say about your future?'

'Unexpected consequences will arise for past decisions.'

'Typical smokescreening.' Anders rolled himself atop the covers, arms folded across his chest as he looked at the ceiling. 'Hawke went to Merrill as well. After.'

If their hands touched, Fenris could no longer convince himself it was by accident. He tugged Anders closer, out of the rigid funereal posture, as if he had both the authority and strength. Anders came.

'She'll survive.' Fenris was certain, and so it sounded dismissive.

'Such a tender heart you have.' Trace approval and irony.

Removing Anders from his padding was always a surprise, again item for item, so that the only speeding breath was mutual, of searching eyes and baring skin instead of old things. For the smallness Anders seemed without the layers, a feeling as if the bones of the skull were too much for the frame to support. Ascetic, Fenris thought, in some ways; visible was the shape of the old man he would become.

Distinctly aged, the band of sweat along his brow no longer desirable but rather the mark of a tired old man; Fenris felt an abject and sorry deference and ducked his head.

Then he blinked, and it was Anders' hands stroking through his hair again, tilting his chin high to see there was only sparing threads of grey in his gold, and only the beginnings of evening stubble on his cheeks.

'Are you still with me?' The hand squeezed his shoulders.

But he was all acceptance. The emasculated pet, not even his cock his own. Only the hand told him different, squeezing. Fenris swallowed.

'I thought of you. As a magister.' In rushed clarity, 'just for a moment. I am here.'

Pause. A tight smile. 'No small surprise.' Then Anders flung his arms wide, the bare chest flexing. 'A book, was it? Let me find one.'

'Apostate--'

'No, in truth, why not? Show me what a terror it was.' The mage reappeared with a script in his hand, fell back to the bed. 'Or is it that you want me to be serving you all the time? I like it the other way around more, as well. A mismatch of sorts. Perhaps we can flip a coin to decide who gets the pleasure and who gets to sweat?'

'You would lose. You always lose.'

'You only ever used to win because you were all bluff.'

Fenris looked at the body stretched beside him and moved, straddling. Anders affected interest in the text, yelping as Fenris dragged him to the edge of the bed to manipulate him.

'You're not telling me a magister got on his hands and knees for a slave.'

'Still you provoke? No, not hands and knees. On your back, then turn your hips, tuck one knee to your chest.' He made adjustments to the posture, Anders resisting his palm for the sake of it, then drew a sheet from the linen closet by the door. 'Do not look at me.'

'Fenris?'

'You wanted to do this, mage. Do not look at me.' The sheet covered Anders from chin to heel, Fenris folding in old patterns to bare the arse without compromising the rest. He tucked a fold beneath the heel and pressed the ankles together, firmly. 'Read your book. I am not here.'

The eyes were blinking fast, Anders turning awkwardly to the text. 'Hawke isn't home.'

'Do you intend to shout my name?'

'Hardly. Unless it's an order, I should think. I meant only if you wanted to sneak into his bedroom and acquire his slick.'

'I have anticipated,' Fenris admitted, which made Anders laugh. 'Read your book!'

It was a farce from the outset; from posture alone he flicked from old reality to this current one, squeamish again, until the current world overwhelmed, where Anders hissed and bit his lip and pushed into his probing fingers with excessive delight and fluttering orifice, making noise enough Fenris felt himself blush, helplessly. The book slipped beneath Anders' cheek when the mage arched and cried out and blessed his fingers for something else, when Anders clutched the sheet over him and bared his own back and shoulders, groaning into his cupped palms. The pages tore under the tossing head. Impossible to believe the hyperbole. Fenris' erection ached to thrust, his whole body tense as a flying arrow. He caught at Anders' wrist when the mage flailed and tried to rub himself through the tangled overlay.

'You don't have to do this.'

The eyes were hazed, arse clenching on four of his fingers. Fenris moved them apart in response, Anders' face creasing in pain and lust.

'What? What!'

'Pretend. So loudly. To make me feel as if I am...here.'

To make mock of the old men who had used him before. The hissing cruelty wound through his skull pulled taut, threatened to snap against the ridiculousness. The answering grin looked like a boy's, whatever the stubble on the upper lip girding it.

'You look ridiculous,' Fenris told him. 'You sound ridiculous.'

'If you don't sodding fuck me I'll show you loud and ridiculous. Slave.'

He had to growl. 'Provoker.'

Still, still. His first thrust went shy, and he nearly lost erection at the failure, body coiling in on itself. Anders splayed himself wider in response, full on his back now, knees creaking, beckoning. The hole shone pinkly, clenching. He could not resist. He thrust nearly to the root, Anders yowling like a cat in his ear. He clapped his hand over the mage's mouth, wrenching it away when Anders bit.

'Maker. After what you said to me in the bath a fortnight ago, you turn out to be the prude.'

'I have some sense of dignity.'

'No one,' Anders said, 'has dignity like this. What do you think lovemaking is except a shared potential to humiliate the other? And that you don't, that people choose not to - that's the only wonder of it all. The rest of it is the same as an animal. Only people can be made to feel shame.'

Anders clenched on him, hard, so that Fenris moaned as he went to speak. So he was forced to agree.

They were not separated. Fenris' focus skittered from the flesh around him, to his own flesh, the urge driving his hips to thrust. Anders clutched at the mattress with nothing to brace, but to grab his wrists and hold him was enough. Brace and thrust both. Fenris was strong enough for that. Then he had to cease to think, because the thoughts got in the way, fouled his thrusts, threatened to destroy the longing, aching arousal; he saw and felt the point when Anders arched suddenly and went silent, the solid erection between his legs jerking and spilling, untouched.

The mage went limp. 'Fenris?'

Dazed. As a child.

'You have no idea how long it's been,' Anders said. He sounded like he wanted to cry. 'No! No, don't pull out. Stay--' His grip on the willing, reddened wrists was turned against him, Anders grabbing in turn. 'Finish. You haven't yet.'

'It will hurt you.'

'So what? You had four fingers in me, don't think the sheet kept me from feeling that, it's no bigger than-- As if a magister would have ever let you go so far.' The blurred gaze sharpened, focused. 'You haven't, have you.'

Guilt. Inexplicable. 'What?'

'Tied? With a lover.'

'Of course I have. Have you forgotten what you so bluntly would call my mercenary tendencies?' So distant he could not even remember the drive which had pushed him to demand the presence of strangers, if never in the way he had wanted. Absurd. 'At least this is not against a wall.'

'Oh,' an ineffable sorrow. 'I wanted it to be special.'

What fragments of his identity left were not designed to withstand this, while Fenris himself remained unconvinced of the importance of his presence when his body has sufficed to serve; the act of sex demolished his personality before. Orgasm was all they wanted of him.

In dejection, Anders lay spread like a compass impaled, a kink in endlessness, the spill collected in his navel like a font, which Fenris touched with surprise and saw Anders raised his head, hope built into the very bones of his face.

'I have never had to fight not to laugh so much in my life,' Fenris said, with a careful voice. It is special.

Anders echoed his tone, even if the eyebrows told the lie. 'You say the sweetest things.'

He moved his knees onto the bed, between the spread thighs; looked at the skin stretched around his darkness and felt a moment of sparking fear and envy. He wanted, felt himself clench on emptiness. Turned about Anders' hands and placed them on his buttocks. The mage grabbed and pulled him close, the spread almost enough. Hands and knees over him, but with Anders knotted up beneath him, the pressure on his shoulders it could not feel like anything else but what it was--

A fear when it came, trying to hold back. Anders dug in his fingertips so hard Fenris felt sure his arse would bear ten prints of bruise, and pulled him close. A single soundless shout, true pain on the face. Fenris fought not to collapse as the pleasure crested, such tightness, the body's alien anatomy shuddering to reject him.

So good. So good. How could he have forgotten? The pain creases deepened, and he was apologising, helplessly, uncertain of the language. Such pleasure. Anders smothered him with his mouth, sloppy. 'Maker, you are so large. No, no, don't be upset. I can feel your heartbeat. All the way up me. I can feel you coming all the way up to my heart. It's fine--'

'Ridiculous,' Fenris managed, between choking pleasure.

'Yes, yes it is. Oh. I'm going to come again. It's so much. I have to spill somewhere. Look--'

Fenris felt the cheek rasp against his, just barely. One hand abandoned his buttocks, snaking between them. The fat cock almost didn't need it, a few light touches before Anders was off, the shuddering closing on Fenris hard.

After there was languor, so solid it wanted to drown him. Emptying himself, then sliding free, as Anders mourned it going. Fenris lay in the lantern light and stroked the hairs on Anders' wrist.

'It is a simple thing,' he managed. 'Now that I remember it.'

A grunt from the other. Anders was touching himself between the legs, fingers circling what had been done to him. The motion of the wrist warmed something in Fenris, as if he wanted to arouse again. Spent too soundly for his flesh to do more than tingle.

'Messy,' Anders noted.

'Do you feel it?' His throat hurt. 'The lyrium? When I--'

Now the eyes were wide. Serious. 'Yes.'

'Does it revolt you.' It revolted him, abstractedly. He could not know what it felt like.

'Not really.'

But it was often like that.

Anders leaned over to lick the insides of his mouth, the tongue as welcomed as his own. 'I taste it even off your lip, here. There's nothing amazing about having it inside me. Except it is, of course, or no one would ever have thought to take you as they did,' ineffable pity, softening the expressive brows. 'But unlike the sex, it doesn't matter.'

The shock was superfluous, Fenris told himself. But he felt rather than saw the blackness at the corners of the room, which had been relief from too much horror as well as bane. The prickling numbness, anger and despair the same and understandable. He battered away the temptation to fall, this yearning, engulfing tiredness. 

These things which are mine, he thought, and are not mine. Yet his life.

'I want more,' Fenris said.

A pained flinch. 'Now? Can we wait until tomorrow?'

'Sore?' He felt vast and magnanimous. 'You can do me again.'

'Oh, so generous, when you prefer it--'

'Then I will still want more.' It sounded uncertain. 'Is that wrong of me?'

'I've already heard the range of what you want,' Anders said. 'What else is there?'

'To have you waiting in my bed for me. Or I waiting for you in yours. Without doubt.'

But it was certainty he was afraid of, he thought in retrospect, certainty that life was monotonous and could not change. He opened his mouth to explain himself, but saw that Anders' trepidation, unexpectedly, had intensified. As if endless images of willingly abused flesh were easier for Anders to accept.

'Oh, is that all.'

'Because I want the demon's influence gone,' Fenris deduced; Anders had leapt ahead of him. Or had been thinking the same lie. He could not watch the flesh shatter again. There would be a final time, he knew.

'Only miracles.' Anders sat as if he were about to pace, hissed, and flopped back again. A corpse lay like this. Fenris had to poke him, stirring the arm flung across his chest. 'The simplest answer to that is to end all injustice in the world.'

'I think sometimes I am glad there is injustice.'

Anders looked at him.

'Or I would be forced to accept that these things done-- that those who suffer deserve their despair.'

'Oh,' said Anders. 

'You see only in evidence and ideals. Or Justice would not.'

'I don't know.' He sounded pained again.

'It is not even Justice any longer. What does a demon of vengeance seek to achieve?'

'Only what I want,' Anders said. 'Demons only ever want what we want. They live to serve us. That is the trap.'

'What do you want?'

'In this context?' The voice was rolling an echo, 'At times, nothing more than those bastards to know our pain for as true as theirs.'


End file.
